Engineering Manager – Observability & Ingest

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.

F5 is evolving its observability platform with an AI-first OpenTelemetry (OTEL) edge that ingests telemetry from internal microservices, customer environments, third-party SaaS, and strategic partners. This team also owns the downstream data-engineering fabric that converts raw events into high-quality, analytics-ready datasets that power our products.

As a leader in our AI Center of Excellence, you will balance innovation with responsibility: embracing AI wherever it accelerates engineering and insight while upholding data quality, privacy, and operational rigor. You’ll serve as a cross-team catalyst—partnering with Product, SRE, Security, and multiple feature squads—to embed instrumentation, share best practices, and drive company-wide adoption of our unified data pipeline and AI capabilities.

• Own and evolve the OTEL ingest pipeline: design, scale, and operate a collector fleet processing millions of traces, metrics, and logs per minute.
• Lead a diverse team of 6–8 engineers: Employee management including establishing goals, coaching, conducting performance evaluations, and hiring candidates for open positions, as well as hands-on coding, debugging, setting development standards, architecture reviews.
• Design and build real-time stream processing that normalizes, enriches, and routes data within seconds of arrival.
• Lead data augmentation via ML (anomaly tagging, service-map inference, PII detection) to transform raw traffic into structured, actionable signals.
• Define and uphold canonical schemas, data contracts, and taxonomies for all observability data.
• Champion pragmatic AI use—deploy LLMs or other techniques that shorten feedback loops or boost developer productivity while maintaining safety.

• 7+ years of production software development experience, including 1+ years managing or leading engineers while staying hands-on.
• Proven success operating high-throughput data pipelines - streaming (Kafka, Kinesis, Flink, Spark Structured Streaming) and batch (Spark, Glue, EMR, Airflow).
• Experience with OTEL at scale - collector pipelines, auto-instrumentation, custom schemas.
• Expertise with any combination of programming languages: Golang, Java, Python, Scala, C++ or any high-level proprietary or open-source language with strong programming constructs.  
• Experience with running data workloads on major cloud providers, including use of IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation etc.), observability, and cost tuning.
• Columnar/OLAP proficiency - designing schemas and operating stores such as ClickHouse, Apache Pinot, Druid, or Parquet/Iceberg at multi-terabyte scale.
• Ability to influence and enable cross-functional teams - clear, candid communicator and servant leader.

• Deep performance tuning of JVM/Golang runtimes in ultra-low-latency data paths.
• Hands-on experience translating data-privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA) into technical controls.
• Designing for data regionality/residency - partitioning, localization, and per-region governance of telemetry and customer data.
• Operating and optimizing distributed data systems across multiple cloud regions (cross-region replication, active-active failover, latency and cost trade-offs).
• Public speaking, blogging, or conference presentations on observability, data engineering, privacy, or applied AI.

• We offer continuous learning opportunities and mentorship programs to support your career growth.
• Join a great team where you'll feel at home from day one, leading a positive and supportive workplace culture.
• The team collaborates primarily in North America with at least four hours of overlap with Pacific Time.
• F5 is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace where all employees feel valued and supported.

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 [email protected].