Director of Engineering, Release Management

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.

Director of Engineering, Release Management

Position Overview

The Director of Engineering Release Management will lead and oversee the organization's release management strategy and execution, ensuring smooth and reliable software delivery across multiple product lines. This role combines technical expertise, strategic thinking, and leadership skills to optimize the release process and drive engineering excellence.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Leadership

• Develop and implement the organization's release management strategy, aligning with business objectives and engineering capabilities
• Drive the architecture, execution and delivery of CI/CD platforms, delivery pipelines and related engineering builds/branches and environments
• Define and maintain release management processes, standards, and best practices across engineering teams
• Oversee the technical infrastructure supporting release processes, including CI/CD pipelines, automation tools, and testing frameworks
• Guide the implementation of modern release practices such as feature flags, canary deployments, and automated rollback mechanisms
• Create the strategy for building and owning a self-service; enterprise-scale experimentation platform
• Ensure robust monitoring and alerting systems are in place for release health tracking
• Foster a culture of collaboration and experimentation across engineering and product to enable rapid prototyping, iteration and a “fail-forward” mindset for new feature development. 
• Lead cross-functional initiatives to improve release velocity, quality, and reliability
• Partner with Product, Engineering, and Operations leaders to establish release roadmaps and priorities
• Oversee the end-to-end release lifecycle, from planning through deployment and post-release monitoring
• Establish metrics and KPIs to measure release performance and quality
• Implement risk management strategies to minimize release-related incidents
• Establish release communication protocols and ensure transparency

Process Optimization

• Streamline release processes to reduce cycle time and increase deployment frequency
• Implement and maintain release governance frameworks
• Lead incident post-mortems and drive process improvements
• Establish release communication protocols and ensure transparency

Qualifications

Required Experience

• 10+ years of engineering experience with 5+ years in release management
• 5+ years of people management experience, preferably in a director-level role
• Strong track record of implementing and scaling release processes in high-growth environments
• Deep understanding of CI/CD, DevOps practices, and modern deployment technologies
• Strong expertise in branching strategies
• Experience building or using A/B testing infrastructure and deep understanding of SRE operating models
• Experience setting up complete end to end fully integrated delivery system (source control management, build tools, artifact repositories, deployment and monitoring systems)
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and containerization
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field
• Experience with microservices architecture, releasing 30+ microservices across multiple geo’s and distributed systems
• Track record of successful organizational transformation initiatives
• Strong background in agile methodologies and scaled agile frameworks

Impact & Scope

• Lead a team of 5-10 direct reports with broader influence across engineering organization
• Manage release processes for multiple product lines and services
• Significant influence on engineering culture and practices
• Direct impact on product quality and customer satisfaction
• Key role in scaling engineering operations and improving delivery capabilities

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].