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 F5 AI Security team is looking for a UX manager who thrives in a fast-paced environment solving emergent problems in new technical spaces. This is a player-coach role. You will own the most complex design challenges while acting as the technical lead for two other designers—sharpening their skills, critiquing their logic, and ensuring the team delivers consistent, implementable, and high-quality work. You’ll report to the senior manager for product management and act as a strategic partner and expert.
Key management responsibilities
Talent development: Manage and mentor a small team of product designers, embedded on two product teams. Conduct regular 1:1s, provide actionable design critiques, and create career growth plans that align with both their goals and F5’s needs.
Conduct rigorous design reviews. Move the team beyond "making it look good" to "making it work logically." Push designers to think through edge cases, technical constraints, and complex user flows, while also encouraging them to push the creative boundaries and stretch beyond the “safe” option.
Research & Validation: Build a regular cadence of user feedback and usability testing. Coach the team on how to gather and analyze insights and turn those into well-scoped improvements for the product.
UX strategy & process: Define ways of working. Establish design rituals (ideation, critiques, research cycles) and common deliverables.
Key design responsibilities
Lead by example: Take the lead on the most complex, ambiguous architectural challenges within the AI Security portfolio (e.g., complex workflows, enterprise readiness features, projects requiring strong cross-functional design leadership).
Technical intuition: Work closely with data science and engineering peers to understand the "under the hood" mechanics of our AI tools so the design accurately reflects what the technology can do.
System stewardship: Own the evolution of our Figma design system and our design standards. Ensure it scales across the AI security suite to maintain consistency, accessibility, and high-quality heuristics.
Skills & Competencies
Enterprise design mastery: Deep expertise in simplifying "hard" technical problems (cybersecurity, AI, IR, or infrastructure).
Leadership & influence: Ability to manage up and across. You can justify design decisions to technical stakeholders in terms of business value and risk mitigation.
Design operations: Proficiency in building a scalable design-to-development pipeline. You know how to use tools like Figma and Jira to ensure engineering never has to guess what a "finished" design looks like.
Radical candor: A management style that prioritizes clear, honest feedback to help designers improve their craft rapidly.
Design standards: You have a high standard for what good looks like in enterprise SaaS and you know how to install that standard in your team.
Technical translator: You can talk to a data scientist about an agentic workflow and turn that conversation into a streamlined user flow.
Practical & pragmatic: You understand that "done is better than perfect." You know when to use a design pattern and when to invent something new.
Mentor mindset: You enjoy seeing other designers grow. You measure your success by how much more autonomous and "senior" your team becomes under your guidance.
Qualifications
Experience: 8+ years of UX/Product design experience, with at least 2 years in a formal management or Lead role (mentoring junior/mid-level designers).
Track Record: A portfolio demonstrating shipped enterprise SaaS products where you led the design of complex, end-to-end workflows.
Technical Fluency: You don't need to code, but you must understand technical constraints (APIs, data latency, front-end frameworks) so your team builds implementable designs.
Education: Degree in HCI, Design, or equivalent 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.
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].
