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 dynamic and experienced Field Chief Information Security Officer (Field CISO) to serve as a trusted advisor and thought leader on cybersecurity to our clients and partners. The Field CISO will directly align their expertise with F5 Inc.'s key competencies in application delivery, application security, and multi-cloud environments while fostering trusted relationships with enterprise customers to guide them toward secure technology strategies.
This role combines deep industry knowledge, customer engagement, security leadership, and technical expertise with adaptability in a highly dynamic and complex field. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in modern application security, digital transformation, cloud migration challenges, and advanced threat mitigation—areas central to F5's mission.
Key Responsibilities:
Customer Engagement:
- Act as a trusted security advisor to enterprise customers, helping them identify gaps in their technologies and shaping robust application security solutions.
- Partner with customer and partner C-Suite executives (CIOs, CISOs) to advocate for and influence business-centric security transformation aligned with F5's offerings.
- Host thought leadership sessions, industry roundtables, and educational talks to present F5's vision for application security and performance.
Strategy and Technical Leadership:
- Support customers in navigating challenges related to application delivery and multi-cloud migration, including maintaining application reliability, scalability, and security.
- Offer insights and guidance on web application firewalls (WAFs), bot management, API security, DNS protection, load balancing, DDoS mitigation, and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)-like solutions.
- Stay updated on the Zero Trust architecture and facilitate its adoption among enterprise clients.
- Lead efforts to align cybersecurity best practices with evolving cloud-native architecture powered by container-based ecosystems (like Kubernetes).
Cross-Functional Collaboration:
- Collaborate with internal teams such as Product Management, Sales, Professional Services, and Marketing to ensure F5 solutions are customized to client needs.
- Provide strategic input to sales teams, highlighting security-driven benefits of F5’s BIG-IP, NGINX, Distributed Cloud Services, and AWS/Azure integrations.
- Work with external regulatory agencies and compliance committees to ensure F5 solutions adhere to modern standards like GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and other frameworks.
Thought Leadership & Evangelism:
- Drive F5 Inc.'s security narrative through participation in industry events, interviews, and cyber summits.
- Contribute content in the form of whitepapers, keynote presentations, and blog posts focused on securing hybrid IT environments.
Required Qualifications:
Proven track record as a Senior CISO, Deputy CISO, or similar leadership role, preferably in industries undergoing rapid digital transformation (financial services, healthcare, retail, etc.).
Deep understanding of F5's core offerings, such as:
- Load balancing and application delivery controllers (ADCs).
- Application and API protection capabilities, such as WAFs, bot defense, and encrypted traffic inspection.
- Cloud-native security challenges specific to Kubernetes, Containers, APIs, and Distributed Architectures.
Experience securing and scaling enterprise applications across multi-cloud or hybrid ecosystems (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud).
In-depth technical knowledge of application security protocols, including SSL/TLS, identity management (e.g., OAuth, SAML), and OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities.
Strong familiarity with Zero Trust frameworks and micro-segmentation strategies.
Expertise in DDoS mitigation, DNS threat protection, and bot detection technologies.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Security certifications such as CISSP, CCSP, CISM, or SANS GXPN.
- Experience engaging executive stakeholders regarding strategies for cloud migration security and protecting applications against advanced persistent threats (APTs).
- Successful track record interfacing with large enterprise and federal customers across various verticals.
- Previous experience in contributing to or leading SOC teams.
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.
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.