Sr Infrastructure Capacity Engineer
Other Engineering
San Jose, CA, USA · Texas, USA · Mali · London, UK · Seattle, WA, USA
USD 161,600-242,400 / year + Equity
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:
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.
The Senior Capacity Planning Engineer brings both technical depth and cross-functional instincts to operate effectively at the intersection of supply chain strategy and global infrastructure delivery. You perform at your best under pressure, and exhibit poise, grace, and competence. You can balance strategy and tactics and are always several chess moves ahead of the status quo. You can influence to the net benefit of F5 and Infrastructure Engineering, and operate with extreme independence.
In this role, you will own the alignment between F5's supply planning strategy and its infrastructure capacity needs, ensuring the right compute, networking, and storage resources are available at the right time, in the right locations, to support a global infrastructure footprint that is actively growing.
This is a cross-functional role by design. You'll work directly with Supply Chain, Network Engineering, Infrastructure Operations, Finance, Product, Sales and Procurement as the connective layer that turns capacity signals into supply decisions and supply constraints into planning inputs. The job is ensuring F5's infrastructure can deliver the performance its customers depend on.
Requirements:
- Be Kind
- Define and execute supply planning strategies that keep inventory levels optimized, compress lead times, and ensure F5's supply commitments stay consistently ahead of global infrastructure expansion.
- Drive capacity planning from end to end, with accountability for hardware deployments that simultaneously meet performance standards, cost targets, and delivery timelines.
- Work closely with Product and Engineering to understand how roadmap commitments translate into infrastructure demand, and push back, with data, when forecasted demand doesn't align with available or procurable capacity.
- Engage with vendors and OEM partners on hardware roadmaps, supply chain lead times, and capacity-relevant product transitions. Understand the procurement landscape well enough to factor it into your planning assumptions, especially in constrained supply environments.
- Collaborate with Procurement to build sourcing strategies that are risk-aware, budget-aligned, and structured to support F5's infrastructure objectives at scale.
- Engage Infrastructure Operations and Data Center teams to optimize deployment processes, sharpen workflow efficiency, and hold on-time delivery commitments across both new site launches and existing infrastructure.
- Build and continuously refine demand forecasting models that tie infrastructure requirements directly to business growth signals, traffic patterns, and shifting customer needs.
- Define utilization thresholds, headroom targets, and refresh cycles that balance cost efficiency against performance risk and operational resilience.
- Raise the operational ceiling of the capacity planning function by identifying and implementing tools, methodologies, and process improvements that increase speed, analytical depth, and planning accuracy.
- Advance the team's use of AI-driven analytics and forecasting techniques, applying them where they meaningfully improve the quality of strategic decisions and the scalability of infrastructure planning.
- Deliver data-driven capacity insights and concrete recommendations to senior leadership via clear, real-time reporting artifacts, providing the analytical grounding needed to make confident infrastructure investment and resource allocation decisions.
What You'll Bring
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years of experience in infrastructure capacity planning, infrastructure engineering, or a closely related discipline, with a track record of owning capacity planning functions.
- Demonstrated expertise in compute capacity planning at scale, including hands-on experience building demand forecast models, defining utilization policies, and managing capacity roadmaps across large, multi-site production environments.
- Hyperscale or SaaS background: You've done this at a company where infrastructure runs at scale.
- Compute architecture depth: You understand compute and network hardware at a level that lets you reason about generations, form factors, power envelopes, memory and storage configurations, and what those choices mean for capacity math.
- Broad infrastructure literacy: You don't need to be a network or security engineer, but you need to understand how network bandwidth, security appliance capacity, and physical data center constraints interact with compute capacity planning, and you need to be able to work fluently across those domains to produce a single integrated capacity model.
- Strong analytical and modeling skills: Proficiency in tools and methods for building, validating, and communicating capacity models whether that's Python, SQL, advanced Excel, or purpose-built capacity planning platforms. The tool matters less than the rigor. The result, however, must be a dashboard, queryable agentic AI, or other real-time artifact, not a PowerPoint deck.
- Operational credibility: You've been close enough to production infrastructure to understand what utilization numbers mean, what breaks when capacity runs out, and how to translate that operational reality into planning decisions that engineering and operations teams will trust and follow.
- Clear, executive-ready communication: You can write a crisp capacity briefing, present it to a VP, defend your assumptions, and translate complex infrastructure analysis into the language of business risk and investment.
- Proficiency with monitoring and observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog).
- Solid knowledge of system performance metrics (CPU, memory, disk, IOPS, network throughput).
- Experience with capacity forecasting methodologies and workload modeling.
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
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: $161,600.00 - $242,400.00F5 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.