At F5, we strive to bring a better digital world to life. Our teams empower organizations across the globe to create, secure, and run applications that enhance how we experience our evolving digital world. We are passionate about cybersecurity, from protecting consumers from fraud to enabling companies to focus on innovation.

Everything we do centers around people. That means we obsess over how to make the lives of our customers, and their customers, better. And it means we prioritize a diverse F5 community where each individual can thrive.

Position Overview

The Head of Crisis Management is a high-visibility leadership role responsible for ensuring the organization can respond rapidly, decisively, and effectively to events that threaten business operations, organizational reputation, or stakeholder safety. This leader owns the complete crisis management lifecycle—from preparedness and planning through response, recovery, and post-crisis improvement. As the designated incident commander for enterprise-level events, this role maintains direct access to the SVP and C-Suite for immediate escalation, serving as the calm center of organizational response when crises unfold. With oversight of reputational resilience and integration across legal, HR, and communications functions, this position ensures that crisis response protects not only operational continuity but the organization's most valuable intangible assets.

Key Responsibilities

• Crisis Management Plan ownership: Develop, maintain, and continuously improve the enterprise Crisis Management Plan, framework, and supporting procedures.
• Crisis Management Team leadership: Lead the Crisis Management Team (CMT) during declared crises, coordinating cross-functional response and ensuring unified command.
• Incident command: Serve as incident commander for enterprise-level events, directing response activities, allocating resources, and making time-critical decisions under pressure.
• Executive crisis exercises: Design and execute executive-level crisis exercises including tabletop discussions, functional drills, and full-scale simulations that test decision-making at the highest levels.
• Crisis declaration protocols: Establish clear crisis declaration criteria and escalation protocols that enable rapid mobilization without unnecessary false alarms.
• Stakeholder notification: Own stakeholder notification processes, tools, and templates ensuring timely, accurate communication to all affected parties during crisis events.
• Cross-functional coordination: Coordinate crisis response activities with Legal, Human Resources, Corporate Communications, and other key functions to ensure integrated, consistent response.
• External vendor management: Manage relationships with external crisis support vendors including crisis communications firms, forensic investigators, and specialized response consultants.
• Post-crisis review: Conduct comprehensive post-crisis reviews, capturing lessons learned and driving improvement actions that strengthen future response capabilities.
• 24/7 response capability: Maintain around-the-clock crisis response capability with defined on-call rotations, escalation paths, and mobilization procedures.
• Reputational resilience oversight: Provide dotted-line oversight of Reputational Resilience domain, ensuring crisis communications and reputation protection are integrated into response plans.
• Executive interface: Interface directly with executives and board members during crisis situations, providing situational awareness, decision support, and recommendations.
• Command center operations: Manage crisis command center and war room operations, ensuring facilities, technology, and protocols are ready for immediate activation.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• Crisis management expertise: 12+ years of progressive experience in crisis management, emergency management, or organizational response leadership within complex enterprise environments.
• Response leadership: 7+ years of leadership experience managing crisis response teams, with demonstrated ability to lead under pressure and make critical decisions with incomplete information.
• Proven crisis experience: Demonstrated experience leading organizational response to significant crises including cyber incidents, operational disruptions, reputational events, or natural disasters.
• Executive presence: Exceptional executive presence and communication skills with ability to brief C-Suite and board members clearly and confidently during high-stress situations.
• Incident command proficiency: Strong experience with Incident Command System (ICS), National Incident Management System (NIMS), or equivalent crisis management frameworks.
• Cross-functional influence: Ability to coordinate and influence across Legal, HR, Communications, IT, and business functions without direct authority during crisis situations.
• Exercise design expertise: Experience designing and facilitating executive-level crisis exercises that challenge participants and reveal organizational vulnerabilities.
• Media and communications savvy: Understanding of crisis communications principles, media dynamics, and reputation management strategies.
• Education: Bachelor's degree required; Master's degree in emergency management, business administration, or related field preferred.
• Certifications: CBCP, CEM, or equivalent crisis/emergency management certification required; ICS certifications and crisis communications training highly desirable.

Desired Attributes

• Calm under pressure leader who maintains composure and clarity when others are overwhelmed, serving as the stabilizing force during chaotic situations.
• Decisive decision-maker who can synthesize incomplete information rapidly and commit to courses of action when delay creates greater risk.
• Natural communicator who can translate complex, evolving situations into clear, actionable guidance for diverse audiences from frontline teams to board members.
• Relationship architect who builds trust and credibility before crises occur, enabling effective coordination when events unfold.
• Continuous learner who studies crisis events across industries, extracting lessons and adapting organizational capabilities to emerging threat patterns.

Future Vision (3–5 Years)

• AI-enhanced situational awareness: Leverage artificial intelligence and real-time data aggregation to provide commanders with comprehensive situational awareness and decision support during events.
• Predictive crisis intelligence: Implement predictive analytics that identify emerging crisis indicators, enabling proactive response mobilization before events fully materialize.
• Virtual command center: Deploy fully virtual crisis command capabilities enabling distributed response teams to coordinate effectively regardless of physical location.
• Automated stakeholder communications: Implement intelligent notification systems that automatically tailor crisis communications to stakeholder segments based on role, location, and impact.
• Immersive simulation training: Utilize advanced simulation technologies to create realistic crisis scenarios that train executives and response teams without operational risk.
• Integrated resilience response: Achieve seamless integration across crisis management, business continuity, disaster recovery, and cyber response—eliminating silos and enabling unified organizational response.

Impact of the Role

This role serves as the organization's shield during its most challenging moments, ensuring that when crises strike, response is swift, coordinated, and effective. As the leader of enterprise crisis response, the Head of Crisis Management directly impacts the organization's ability to protect employee safety, preserve customer trust, maintain stakeholder confidence, and safeguard organizational reputation. Through rigorous preparation, realistic exercises, and seamless cross-functional coordination, this leader ensures that crises are contained rather than compounded—transforming potentially existential events into demonstrations of organizational resilience. In an era of escalating threats and instantaneous scrutiny, this position determines whether the organization emerges from crises stronger or diminished.

The Job Description is intended to be a general representation of the responsibilities and requirements of the job. However, the description may not be all-inclusive, and responsibilities and requirements are subject to change.

F5 maintains broad salary ranges for its roles in order to account for variations in knowledge, skills, experience, geographic locations, and market conditions, as well as to reflect F5’s differing products, industries, and lines of business. The pay range referenced is as of the time of the job posting and is subject to change.

You may also be offered incentive compensation, bonus, restricted stock units, and benefits. More details about F5’s benefits can be found at the following link: https://www.f5.com/company/careers/benefits. F5 reserves the right to change or terminate any benefit plan without notice.

Please note that F5 only contacts candidates through F5 email address (ending with @f5.com) or auto email notification from Workday (ending with f5.com or @myworkday.com).

Equal Employment Opportunity

It is the policy of F5 to provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and employment applicants without regard to unlawful considerations of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, sensory, physical, or mental disability, marital status, veteran or military status, genetic information, or any other classification protected by applicable local, state, or federal laws. This policy applies to all aspects of employment, including, but not limited to, hiring, job assignment, compensation, promotion, benefits, training, discipline, and termination. F5 offers a variety of reasonable accommodations for candidates. Requesting an accommodation is completely voluntary. F5 will assess the need for accommodations in the application process separately from those that may be needed to perform the job. Request by contacting accommodations@f5.com.