AI / ML Engineer II at F5 in Seattle, WA

Founded in 1996, F5 is a global leader in application delivery and security. Our premier platform helps customers secure and deliver every app, API, and piece of infrastructure across all environments. Backed by over three decades of expertise and 553 patents, our solutions protect against threats while ensuring fast, reliable digital experiences. 

With over 6,400 employees, we serve more than 23,000 customers in over 170 countries. To continue this work, we need people like you—the best minds in the industry. We're committed to a unique, human-first culture that encourages authenticity, prioritizes diversity and inclusion, and fosters the growth and success of our employees. 

Position Summary 
The AI Center of Excellence is seeking an AI Center of Excellence Engineer to support applied AI research, prototyping, and engineering initiatives. This role helps evaluate emerging AI techniques, develop best practices for applying AI to business and product challenges, and create architecture recommendations for integrating AI capabilities into production systems. The position also supports evaluation of solution effectiveness through defined performance and business outcomes, helping ensure AI efforts deliver practical value. The ideal candidate will bring strong experience in Python, SQL, machine learning experimentation, and modern AI engineering environments, supported by a master’s-level foundation in data science or a related technical field. 

The ideal candidate will be able to:   

• Support research and evaluation of emerging AI, machine learning, and generative AI techniques for product, platform, and business applications.  

• Build prototypes, proof-of-concepts, and technical experiments to assess feasibility, performance, scalability, and implementation tradeoffs.  

• Assist in the development of data pipelines, model evaluation workflows, benchmarking processes, and deployment-readiness practices.  

• Contribute to architecture recommendations and implementation guidance for integrating AI capabilities into products and internal platforms.  

• Prepare technical documentation, research summaries, and implementation guidance for engineering and cross-functional stakeholders. 

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:   

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, Mathematics, or a related technical field.  

• 2-4 years of relevant industry experience, or equivalent graduate research and internship experience, in machine learning, data science, or applied AI.  

• Strong programming skills in Python and strong working knowledge of SQL.  

• Experience developing, evaluating, and analyzing machine learning models in applied or production-oriented environments.  

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate technical findings into practical recommendations. 

• Familiarity with modern AI topics such as transformer architecture, time series analysis, anomaly detection, or generative AI. 

Preferred Qualifications  

• Exposure to cloud and MLOps environments such as AWS, Azure, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, MLflow, or Databricks.  

• Experience with distributed data or ML systems using tools such as Spark or cloud-based processing frameworks.  

• Understanding of responsible AI, explainability, model monitoring, drift detection, or data quality validation practices.  

• Hands-on experience using Jupyter for experimentation, analysis, model development, and technical investigation. 

Core Competencies  

• Analytical problem-solving and structured technical thinking  

• Ability to collaborate across research, engineering, and product teams  

• Attention to documentation, quality, and implementation detail  

• Learning agility in fast-evolving technical environments 

What Success Looks Like  

• Produces clear, well-structured documentation and research summaries for stakeholders.  

• Contributes to practical architecture guidance for integrating AI into products and platforms.  

• Supports experimentation and implementation efforts with sound engineering discipline.  

• Becomes a dependable contributor across both research-focused and engineering-focused initiatives. 

Why Join the AI Center of Excellence 
This role offers the opportunity to work at the intersection of AI research, engineering, and product innovation. The successful candidate will gain exposure to modern AI methods, experimentation frameworks, and architectural patterns for bringing AI solutions into production. It is an excellent opportunity for a candidate with strong graduate training and applied experience to help shape how AI is adopted across the organization.