Sr Architect, Distributed Cloud

Chief Architect / Sr. Architect – Distributed Cloud

F5 Distributed Cloud is looking for a Sr Architect to lead the architectural vision, strategy, and execution across our entire distributed SaaS platform. This is a senior leadership role responsible for ensuring scalability, security, performance, and agility across all technical domains of the service—including CDN functionality, modern security capabilities (WAAP, WAF, DDoS), traffic management and load balancing, orchestration and control plane technologies, and global observability infrastructure. You will:

• Set long-term architectural direction, guiding major technology choices and innovation areas.
• Influence and shape technical strategy across networking, service discovery, workload orchestration, configuration management, and telemetry.
• Oversee architectural governance, ensuring design consistency, risk management, and scalability across teams and services.
• Establish architectural guardrails and principles for service isolation, zero trust, multi-region resilience, performance, and developer velocity.
• Drive cross-functional alignment among product, security, infrastructure, SRE, and development teams to ensure coherent, secure, and customer-driven architecture.
• Collaborate with product, SRE, and development teams to define scalable, secure, and fault-tolerant designs aligned with platform goals.
• Mentor senior architects and technical leads, growing architecture talent and fostering technical leadership across the organization.
• Represent Distributed Cloud architecture and capabilities to executive stakeholders, customers, and external forums.
• Ensure all components and systems are designed with operability, testability, compliance, and security as first principles.

Job Duties and Responsibilities:

• Work closely with product and development teams to ensure software and product architectures are developed in line with the vision and future direction of the company.
• Drive architectural reviews, design validations, and threat models to ensure operational, security, and scalability concerns are addressed early.
• Partner with management on driving product timelines.
• Lead technical due diligence, competitive assessments, and horizon scanning for new technologies and paradigms.
• Lead software development projects.
• Ensure the documenting and recording every aspect of Distributed Cloud.
• Planning, tracking and scheduling software deliverables.
• Ensure teams can identify problems within software systems and driving issues to resolution.
• Developing good working relationships with other employees and senior leadership.

Skills and Qualifications:

• 12+ years in architecture leadership roles, with 5+ years in a Chief Architect or Principal Architect capacity for a global SaaS or cloud platform.
• Proven experience designing and operating multi-tenant, multi-region, highly available SaaS services at global scale.
• Deep technical expertise in CDN, edge computing, routing, load balancing, DDoS mitigation, and application layer security.
• Understanding of containers and orchestration technologies.
• Broad understanding of coding and programming languages.
• Extensive knowledge of the software development process and corresponding technologies.
• Excellent understanding of design patterns and architectural styles.
• Proficient knowledge of the operation and development designs of agile software.
• Strong soft skills, including attention to detail, problem-solving and communication skills. (This role may be eligible for remote home office if not located in the Seattle or San Jose areas of residence)