Principal AI Engineer — Customer Success/Support
Volterra
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.
Why this role matters
As F5 scales its SaaS and subscription offerings, intelligent automation and AI-driven experiences across support and success workflows are mission-critical. The Principal AI Engineer will design, build, and operate the core ML/AI systems that power self-service, agent assist, knowledge automation, routing, summarization, and safety/observability tooling — delivering measurable improvements in CSAT, deflection, MTTR and agent productivity.
Position summary
You will lead the technical vision and delivery for AI systems across the Customer Success & Support portfolio (myF5, case management, knowledge, omni-channel). You’ll translate product needs into robust machine learning architectures, own model lifecycle and MLOps, implement safe RAG/LLM systems and observability, and partner closely with Product, Support Ops, Security/Compliance, and external vendor platforms to ship production-grade solutions. You are both a hands-on engineer able to deliver production code and an influencer who mentors engineers and sets engineering standards.
Key responsibilities
- Define technical architecture and roadmap for AI capabilities in support workflows: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), LLM-based assistants, intent classification, summarization, knowledge generation/maintenance, and conversational systems.
- Lead end-to-end model lifecycle: data pipelines, training, evaluation, fine-tuning, validation, deployment and continuous monitoring (MLOps).
- Build and operate production-quality ML services and APIs (scalable inference, caching, batching, latency SLAs); write performant, well-tested code (primarily Python).
- Design and implement safety, privacy, and governance controls for generative systems: hallucination mitigation, provenance/explainability, access control, logging/audit, and data protection (including FedRAMP/GovCloud considerations where required).
- Integrate AI components with platform systems (Salesforce Service Cloud / Experience Cloud, myF5 portal, search engines like Coveo), and with Azure/AWS cloud services and data platforms.
- Instrument KPIs and observability for AI features (deflection rate, CSAT impact, SLA compliance, model accuracy, latency, drift)—use metrics to drive iterations.
- Prototype, experiment, and evaluate new models and approaches; maintain a “research → product” mindset to bring practical, timely AI to production.
- Coach and mentor engineers and data scientists; set best practices for reproducible experiments, feature engineering, model tests, and CI/CD for models.
What success looks like
- Significant, measurable increase in self-service adoption and case deflection (quantified percent improvement year-over-year).
- Demonstrable improvements in agent productivity (e.g., faster average handle time, reductions in escalations) attributable to LLM-assisted tooling.
- Stable, low-latency ML services with clear observability and alerting; demonstrable model governance (audit trails, reduced hallucination incidents).
- Cross-functional stakeholders (Support, Security, Product, Sales) report high satisfaction and trust in AI capabilities.
Required qualifications
- 10+ years software engineering experience (or equivalent), with significant recent experience building and shipping ML/AI systems to production.
- Strong programming skills in Python; experience writing production-quality services and APIs.
- Deep applied ML expertise: model training, evaluation, feature engineering, experimental design, and productionization. Familiarity with deep learning and NLP architectures (transformers/LLMs).
- Hands-on experience with LLMs: fine-tuning, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, conversational agents, summarization, and mitigation of LLM failure modes.
- Strong MLOps and data engineering experience: building data pipelines, model CI/CD, monitoring, and automated retraining workflows. Familiarity with Spark/Databricks, SQL and large-scale data processing.
- Cloud experience (AWS and/or Azure) and delivering services with production security, identity, and networking concerns.
- Demonstrated ability to translate business requirements (customer success/support workflows) into technical solutions and to communicate complex technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders.
- Bachelor’s or advanced degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field, or equivalent experience.
Preferred / differentiators
- Prior experience building AI for customer support, knowledge management, or contact center automation (Salesforce Service Cloud / Coveo / similar).
- Experience operating in regulated environments (FedRAMP/GovCloud readiness) or implementing enterprise compliance controls.
- Experience with multi-modal models (text + image / other data) and vector databases (FAISS, Milvus, etc.).
- Track record of mentoring engineers and establishing engineering best practices across teams.
Skills & behaviors we value
- Strategic technical thinker who pairs vision with pragmatic execution.
- Customer-obsessed: focuses on measurable customer outcomes and operational efficiency.
- Collaborative across product, support, security, and external partners.
- Data-driven: designs experiments and uses metrics to prioritize and iterate.
- Pragmatic AI champion: knows both the opportunity and limits of generative systems and operationalizes them responsibly.
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.