The Role

The Director of Capacity Engineering will be globally responsible for leading the team, technology, and processes which provide capacity planning and capacity delivery services to F5’s SaaS platform (network, compute, security, datacenter). The ideal candidate for this role has deep capacity planning and provisioning/delivery leadership experience at consumer webscale. You are verifiably well-known within the industry, and have deep, active relationships with your peers in similar companies.

You are drawn to disruptive technology, and are excited by the idea of driving velocity and maturity into an existing SaaS platform and team. You think long-term, and can field personnel and processes that ensure F5’s SaaS platform is consistently right-sized relative to demand. You intrinsically know which capacity levels to pull, and when to pull them. You can balance cost with good capacity optimization choices, and are unafraid to provide constructive feedback to any level of leadership. You have deep experience working with leadership at our capacity suppliers, and can work directly with them to ensure F5’s needs are met. You are an engineer first, and can engage the best engineers in your team (or F5’s most senior executives) in a detailed, good-spiritedtechnical debate. You are a mentor and coach at least as much as you are a manager.

You are driven, highly empathetic, fearlessly kind, and believe in the concept of exhibiting and soliciting personal authenticity without compromise. You never settle for less on culture, people or values. You are radically transparent, and always tell the truth to any level of the organization.

Responsibilities

• Lead the team responsible for providing network, compute, datacenter and security capacity planning and delivery services to F5’s SaaS suite of products

• Engineer the infrastructure capacity plan and delivery timelines such that F5’s SaaS platforms can deliver optimal performance at 99.99% availability

• Partner closely with the procurement and finance teams to ensure that the capacity plan is well-understood and docuemented within the context of the budget

• Drive automation into the capacity lifecycle, including capacity planning/data science, capacity delivery/provisioning, and decommissioning activities

• Develop, document and publish relevant KPIs

• Work collaboratively with product teams and infrastructure architecture to ensure that the capacity plans reflect the approved product roadmap well in advance of need

• Curate and execute the full infrastructure lifecycle, from planning to decommissioning activities.

• Maintain a flawless, closed-loop inventory of services and dependencies, such that spend doesn’t “get lost” during a capacity change, move or decom

• Partner with the product, sales and archtiecture teams to drive decision-making on partner selection (colo, compute, security, network)

• Partner with network engineering to drive F5’s connectivity partnership & strategy programs (including cloud on-ramp and peering), driving minimum latency and cost to the maximum population of customers.

• Act as a peer to the architecture, operations, automation, and engineering leaders.

• Produce a quarterly all-up capacity roadmap, including hardware, telecommunications, security, and datacenter space/power assets.

• Initiate, track, execute, and close all capacity changes to F5’s SaaS infrastructure

• Drive data science into the capacity planning process, using industry best practices to make data-driven assessments of future capacity needs.

• Provide regular vendor forecasts, ensuring that our capacity roadmap interlocks with those of our vendors

• Lead negotiations with F5’s supplier partners. Ensure contracts and associated covenants strike the right blend of cost and business benefit.

• Identify and create new ways of procuring assets that F5’s SaaS platform needs to operate which are accretive to the platform’s overall margin and operating profile.

Requirements

• Be kind.

• Own and execute the full capacity lifecycle, enabling platform operation at or above 99.99% availability.

• You weave cost and availability into every capacity decision, balancing them to F5’s benefit

• Have 10+ years of progressive consumer webscale or equivalent capacity planning and/or delivery experience.

• Be highly capable of assessing the state of an initiative, making independent decisions/commitments, and being held accountable to them.

• Be able to proactively identify impending capacity-related gaps and independently initiate and execute remediation activities.

• You are supremely capable of designing and executing complex, global capacity uplift programs without inducing customer impact.

• You can confidently and appropriately message status and plans internally and externally.

• You measure everything and act on data.

• You understand that infrastructure operations is your customer, and are always ready to jump in and help when needed. You drive this ethos into your team as well.

• You don’t stop until the issue is resolved.

• You make customers (internal and external) your allies using transparency, grace, poise under pressure, and articulate, clear, empathetic language.

• The quality of your written English language skills is novel-worthy. People look forward to reading what you write and share it as a point of pride.

• Have a bias toward automation as a problem remediation vector and as a velocity enabler

• You enroll support and consensus using data and experience, not opinion

• Dashboards, not PowerPoint

• You have extensive experience in the connectivity strategy and peering ecosystem. You know how to structure global interconnect programs for min(latency) impacting max(customer).

• Partner with your peer organizations closely and openly, ensuring that capacity requirements are well-understood and actioned significantly in advance of need.

• You know who to call in the broader industry when we need to fix a capacity issue quickly.

• You have significant experience working in both retail and wholesale datacenter environments.

• You can readily map F5’s articulated colocation needs to facilities, incorporating availability, metrics/telemetry, compliance needs, commercial terms, connectivity parters and facility design/engineering.

• Your experience in the wholesale and retail connectivity space is well-known. You know exactly what connectivity assets should cost, and drive F5’s contracts into those commercial terms.

• You have significant experience procuring wholesale compute, both as prebuilt systems, and as well as at the component level. You are comfortable optimizing your procurement strategy for cost and deliverability.

• F5’s customers see you as an ally, and seek your input about how they should solve their own complex capacity challenges.

• Your team comes to you with challenges (personal or professional) without fear of judgment or reprisal. They view you as an ally and advocate.

• You recruit, hire and retain exceptional operations talent that is uncompromisingly kind, technically unparalleled, and is uninterested in perpetuating the status quo.