Senior manager, network operations

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.

About the Role

We are seeking a Senior Manager, Network Operations to lead a global team responsible for network reliability and day-to-day operations across F5 Distributed Cloud's commercial and FedRAMP environments. Based in Reston, Virginia, you will help establish the Network Operations function within Infrastructure Operations.

You will combine technical depth with practical and empathetic people leadership. Your team will operate our global backbone, data center networks, cloud networks and related connectivity. You will lead through major incidents and run point for the Change Advisory Board (CAB), making change management a practical discipline that protects service availability while accelerating business velocity.

We are looking for a leader who embodies our expectation to “be kind” by collaborating openly, communicating respectfully, supporting others, driving high performance, and contributing to a feedback-oriented, human-first engineering culture.

Key Responsibilities

People Leadership & Team Development

• Lead and develop a globally distributed Network Operations team. Establish clear responsibilities, operating expectations, and accountability for dependable production support.
• Hire, coach, and develop engineers. Set clear expectations and hold people accountable with fairness and respect.
• Build sustainable coverage, on-call rotations, and cross-region handoffs, with FedRAMP support assigned in accordance with applicable access and staffing requirements.

Network Operations & Reliability

• Own day-to-day network operations for F5 Distributed Cloud's global ip backbone, commercial and FedRAMP environments, including availability, performance, operational health, observability and reporting across transit, peering, backbone, data center, and cloud connectivity services.
• Use monitoring, incident trends, capacity data, and recurring operational work to measure service health and prioritize improvements.
• Partner with Network Engineering on acceptance criteria for new capabilities, operational handoffs, and escalation paths. Bring production experience into design and lifecycle decisions.
• Drive a sense of operational urgency and a customer-first mentality into the broader organization. Be the org-wide example of what good, at-scale, operational and customer-first behavior looks like.

Incident Management & Operational Learning

• Lead the Network Operations response to major incidents and serve as an incident captain when assigned. Establish clear response roles and keep mitigation work focused on restoring service.
• Coordinate with SOC, NOC, engineering, security, and customer-facing teams. Maintain escalation paths and procedures, and communicate impact, decisions, and recovery status clearly under pressure.
• Lead blameless post-incident reviews and problem management. Track corrective actions to closure and use recurring failure patterns to drive engineering work.
• Take responsibility, and ensure that others do the same. Continually raise our operational standards, customer expectations of us, and the expectations we have of ourselves.
• Drive close and continuing engagement with our Customer Support organization, focusing on transparency and alignment to continually improve the F5 customer experience.

Change Management & Change Advisory Board

• Lead the Change Advisory Board function, coordinating change review across participating teams and maintaining clear decision records.
• Drive risk-based review of production changes, with clear expectations for methods of procedure (MOPs), testing, validation, rollback, and approvals across standard, normal, and emergency changes.
• Review failed and emergency changes. Use change outcomes to improve procedures and automation, with traceable records supporting FedRAMP assessments and audit needs.

Automation & Continuous Improvement

• Set an automation-first technical direction for Network Operations. Replace repetitive command-line work and handcrafted configuration changes with version-controlled, repeatable workflows.
• Lead the design, implementation, and operation of network automation using Python, Ansible/AWX, GitOps practices, and CI/CD pipelines. Require peer review, automated testing, policy and compliance gates, pre- and post-change validation, evidence collection, and tested rollback before production use.
• Lead the adoption of AI-assisted network operations for anomaly detection, event correlation, change-risk analysis, incident investigation, and operational knowledge retrieval. Establish testing, access controls, auditability, and human approval for production use.
• Balance incident response and maintenance with planned improvement work. Make risks and dependencies visible.

Documentation & Cross-Functional Partnership

• Maintain usable runbooks, network diagrams, and troubleshooting guides. Partner with Security and Compliance on control evidence and remediation tracking for FedRAMP environments.
• Partner with Network Engineering, Architecture, Datacenter Engineering and Operations, Capacity Engineering, SRE, Security, Product, Customer Support, and Program Management to define operating responsibilities, manage dependencies, and coordinate delivery.

Qualifications

Education & Experience

This role supports F5’s FedRAMP-authorized environments. To comply with U.S. government security requirements, the candidate must be a U.S. citizen located on U.S. soil and must successfully pass the required federal background screening.

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

10+ years of experience in network operations or network engineering roles across large-scale, multi-region production environments.

5+ years of experience leading distributed teams of senior network or infrastructure engineers, including hiring, coaching, performance management, career development, and production support across time zones.

Proven experience leading major incidents, incident and problem management, and a CAB or comparable cross-functional change-management function.

Experience engineering, operating, or supporting FedRAMP Moderate and/or High environments is strongly preferred.

Technical Skills

• Strong understanding of BGP, OSPF, routing policy, and both anycast and unicast traffic engineering in global IP backbone and data center environments, with the ability to guide complex troubleshooting and assess change risk.
• Operational experience with JunOS - MX, QFX experience preferred.
• Operational experience with Arbor, Fortinet, F5 BigIP, Corero, Opengear preferred.
• Working knowledge of DDOS mitigation, proxy and application delivery services.
• Working knowledge of hybrid cloud networking across AWS, Azure, and/or GCP, including private connectivity, VPNs, and cloud routing.
• Demonstrated experience successfully modernizing network operations through production automation using Python, Ansible/AWX, configuration templates, GitOps practices, and CI/CD pipelines. Able to evaluate automation architecture, code review, testing, deployment controls, telemetry, and rollback design.
• Experience evaluating or operationalizing AI-assisted observability, event management, troubleshooting, or change-management capabilities is preferred.
• Understanding of network security controls, including segmentation, boundary protection, encryption, logging, and DDoS mitigation. Familiarity with NIST 800-53-based control frameworks is preferred.
• Ability to translate telemetry and incident, change, and capacity data into operational priorities.
• Strong troubleshooting methodology and thought leadership.

Preferred Certifications

Relevant professional certifications are preferred, including expert-level networking credentials such as JNCIE or CCIE, cloud networking or security credentials, CISSP, or ITIL certification.

Soft Skills

Reinforce a positive culture and demonstrate our expectation to “be kind.” Collaborate openly, communicate respectfully, support others, and make it safe for people to raise concerns or ask for help.

Sound operational judgment, including the ability to pause an unsafe change, escalate a risk, and make decisions with incomplete information.

Clear communication and the ability to build agreement across organizational boundaries and follow through on decisions.

Have a strong bias to action. Your success as a leader in this role is not only evaluated against the way you lead, and the plans you produce, but the measurable results you deliver.

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.

The annual base pay for this position is: $172,500.00 - $258,700.00

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.