Sr Data Scientist
F5 · Hyderabad
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.
Senior Data Scientist
Location: Hyderbad, India (F5 Office 3-5 days/week) Reports To: Director of Data Science Team: Data & Insights Compensation: Competitive salary plus benefits
Role Overview
Join F5's Data & Insights team as a Senior Data Scientist and drive high-impact outcomes through data. You'll own end-to-end modeling projects — from problem framing and stakeholder alignment through deployment and communication of results. Leveraging advanced statistical methods, machine learning, and large language models (LLMs), you'll create and scale data products that drive decision-making, boost revenue, and streamline operations. As a senior member of the team, you'll guide technical direction, elevate team capabilities, and serve as a trusted partner to stakeholders across the organization.
Key Responsibilities
End-to-End Project Ownership
- Independently initiate, scope, execute, and deliver end-to-end modeling projects — from exploratory analysis and feature engineering through model deployment, monitoring, and results communication.
- Define project milestones, make responsible commitments, and consistently deliver against them through every phase of the project lifecycle.
- Communicate project outcomes, business impact, and strategic recommendations to audiences at all levels, including senior leadership.
Stakeholder Partnership & Project Shaping
- Lead stakeholder conversations to clarify ambiguous requirements, refine project specifications, and align on measurable business outcomes.
- Proactively guide stakeholders through trade-offs, prioritization, and expectation-setting to ensure projects are well-scoped and deliver meaningful value.
- Build and maintain trusted relationships with project management, data engineering, data analytics, customer success, marketing, and finance teams.
Data Analysis & Modeling
- Design, develop, and deploy advanced statistical models and machine learning algorithms to address descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive business needs.
- Perform deep exploratory data analysis to uncover trends, patterns, and anomalies in large datasets; translate findings into clear, actionable narratives.
- Build predictive and classification models to forecast key metrics, support operational decisions, and guide business strategy.
- Design and execute experiments, including A/B tests and causal inference methods, to measure impact and inform strategic decisions.
Technical Leadership & Mentorship
- Guide team members on optimal approaches for feature creation and refinement, model evaluation and tuning, and reliable, scalable pipeline deployment.
- Establish and promote best practices for model development, validation, reproducibility, and production readiness.
- Conduct rigorous code reviews and model reviews, raising the quality bar across the Data & Insights team.
AI, Agents & LLM Solutions
- Lead projects for agent evaluation, prompt effectiveness evaluation, and prompt evolution strategies.
- Drive context engineering approaches for grounding LLM solutions in enterprise data, ensuring accuracy, relevance, and safety.
- Contribute to the technical specification and architecture of agent-based solutions for internal business problems.
- Leverage AI-assisted coding tools responsibly in day-to-day work to improve speed, reliability, repeatability, and quality of results.
Innovation & Continuous Improvement
- Stay current with advancements in AI tools, agentic frameworks, data science methodologies, machine learning, and causal inference.
- Continuously refine models, processes, and team workflows to improve accuracy, efficiency, and business impact.
- Identify and champion opportunities to apply new techniques and technologies to existing and emerging business problems.
Qualifications
Education
- Master's degree in Data Science, Statistics, Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, or a related quantitative field. PhD is a plus.
Experience
- 5+ years of professional experience in data science, with a demonstrated track record of independently owning and delivering end-to-end modeling projects that drove measurable business outcomes. Please provide an IP-respectful portfolio of work examples.
- Proven experience managing stakeholder relationships — including scoping projects, navigating ambiguity, setting expectations, and delivering results.
- Hands-on experience working with large-scale datasets using distributed computing platforms such as Snowflake and Databricks.
- Experience mentoring or guiding other data scientists or analysts on technical best practices.
Technical Skills
- Expert-level proficiency in SQL and Python.
- Skilled in LLM prompt engineering, prompt evaluation methodologies, context engineering, and integrating LLM APIs into production workflows.
- Deep expertise with machine learning frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch) and libraries (e.g., scikit-learn).
- Advanced knowledge of feature engineering, feature stores, feature evaluation, and model selection strategies.
- Experience with MLflow and end-to-end ML lifecycle management.
- Strong understanding of experiment design, A/B testing, and causal inference methodologies.
- Experience with containerization and deployment tools (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) for productionizing models and data science solutions.
- Demonstrated ability to build, optimize, and maintain reliable, scalable ML pipelines.
- Proficient with version/source control (e.g., Git), CI/CD workflows, and AI coding assistants.
- Proven ability to evaluate, optimize, and monitor model performance tied to business outcomes, and to guide others in doing the same.
Interpersonal & Leadership Skills
- Skilled at leading stakeholder conversations — able to listen deeply, ask the right questions, clarify requirements, and guide projects toward well-defined, achievable outcomes.
- Demonstrates strong ownership, initiative, and accountability — "figure it out, make it happen, share what you learned, and help others do the same."
- Exceptional communicator who can tailor complex technical concepts to any audience, from engineers to executives.
- Effective working both independently and as a senior contributor within a small, high-demand team.
- Natural mentor who elevates the people around them through guidance, feedback, and example.
Why Join F5?
At F5, we harness the power of data to drive business success. As a Senior Data Scientist on our Data & Insights team, you'll shape the future of data utilization at F5 and deliver critical insights and data products that empower decision-making across the company. You'll have the autonomy to own high-impact projects end to end, the influence to guide technical direction, and the opportunity to mentor a growing team. We offer a collaborative and innovative environment that values professional growth and celebrates impactful contributions. Join us and transform data into a cornerstone of F5's success.
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.