Cathy Peterman

Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer F5

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Cathy Peterman is Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer of F5, Inc., the Seattle-headquartered application delivery and security company listed on NASDAQ as FFIV. Appointed in July 2026 and reporting directly to chairman, president and chief executive François Locoh-Donou, she leads F5’s global people strategy, with responsibility for talent development, organisational design and culture at a company repositioning itself around AI and cybersecurity. She arrived with two decades of experience inside very large technology organisations — most recently as Wayfair’s Chief People Officer for technology, and before that six years at Amazon — and a specialism in the unglamorous machinery of scale: organisational design, executive compensation strategy, people analytics, M&A integration, and using AI inside the HR function itself.

Career Highlights

• Appointed Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer of F5 on 13 July 2026, joining the executive leadership team and reporting to chairman, president and CEO François Locoh-Donou (F5 press release).
• At Wayfair, served as Chief People Officer for the technology organisation, architecting the people strategy for a global engineering group of more than 3,000, and drove AI transformation and talent development across all 11,000 of the company’s global employees (F5 press release and leadership page).
• Spent six years at Amazon leading talent strategy across three distinct businesses supporting more than 40,000 employees, in HR leadership roles spanning Amazon Advertising, Amazon Devices, Prime Video & Studios and Physical Stores (F5 press release).
• Ran enterprise-wide initiatives in organisational design, executive development, people analytics and performance transformation (F5 leadership page).
• Has executed large-scale workforce transformations, M&A integrations and global expansion strategies across organisations of up to 300,000 employees (F5 leadership page).
• On joining, Locoh-Donou described her as bringing “a rare combination of strategic depth and genuine humanity”, and framed culture as a shared priority between them (F5 press release).

Professional Journey

Peterman’s career has been spent in the people function of large, fast-moving technology companies rather than in traditional HR generalist work. Six of those years were at Amazon, where she ran talent strategy across three separate businesses covering more than 40,000 employees and held HR leadership roles across Amazon Advertising, Amazon Devices, Prime Video & Studios and Physical Stores — a set of businesses with very different operating rhythms, from advertising sales to retail floor operations. F5’s account of this period emphasises enterprise-wide programmes: organisational design, executive development, people analytics and performance transformation.

She moved from Amazon to Wayfair as Chief People Officer for the company’s technology organisation. There her direct remit was a global engineering group of over 3,000 people, but her influence ran wider: F5’s announcement credits her with driving AI transformation and talent development across the whole of Wayfair’s 11,000-strong global workforce. It is a combination — deep ownership of a technical population plus a company-wide change mandate — that maps closely onto what F5 subsequently hired her to do.

F5 announced her appointment on 13 July 2026. In her own statement on joining she said she had recognised “a company that treats talent and culture as a core strategy rather than a support function”, and pointed to the rarity of a mature technology company that has kept evolving without losing that commitment. F5 itself is thirty years old and, at the time of her arrival, was pushing hard into AI security and application delivery for AI workloads — the context in which her mandate for talent development, organisational design and culture sits. She is based in Seattle, at F5’s corporate headquarters.

Education

Villanova University

B.A.

University of Denver

M.A.

F5’s press release and leadership page both record these two degrees without naming a field of study or graduation year, so neither is asserted here.