Sr Principal Software Engineer

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.

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Senior Principal Engineer to lead the design, architecture, and strategic development of GSLB on BIGIP-Next. This role is integral to shaping the future of GSLB capabilities, ensuring scalability, performance, and security for application traffic across a wide variety of environments, including on-premises, cloud, colocation facilities, and edge solutions. The Senior Principal Engineer will collaborate closely with internal teams and directly engage with customers to define, design, and deliver innovative solutions that meet both technical and business requirements. This position demands a visionary leader who is not only an expert in system design but also a trusted partner to customers and internal stakeholders alike.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Architectural Leadership: Own the architectural vision for GSLB on BIGIP-Next, defining key system components, performance benchmarks, scalability strategies, and security frameworks. Ensure that architecture decisions align with both immediate and long-term product goals.
• Customer Engagement: Work directly with key customers to understand their technical requirements, business objectives, and pain points. Translate customer needs into actionable technical solutions and guide them through the design and implementation phases. Foster long-term relationships with customers to ensure continued success and satisfaction.
• Strategic Solution Design: Lead the design of highly scalable, robust, and performant solutions for GSLB, leveraging your deep understanding of cloud, networking, and distributed systems to deliver industry-leading products.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Product Management, Customer Support, and Engineering teams to define product requirements, review technical designs, and develop solutions that address customer needs while aligning with broader business goals.
• Leadership and Mentorship: Provide thought leadership within the organization and across engineering teams, mentoring senior engineers and fostering a culture of technical excellence. Serve as the go-to expert for architectural questions, ensuring best practices are followed and technical debt is minimized.
• End-to-End Ownership: Lead the end-to-end process from initial customer engagement, design, and prototyping through to final implementation and post-deployment support, ensuring the highest quality and customer satisfaction.
• Research and Innovation: Stay on the cutting edge of emerging technologies and industry trends, exploring new tools, methodologies, and architectures that can be integrated into GSLB to meet evolving customer demands and market conditions.
• Solution Customization: Customize and adapt GSLB architectures to meet unique customer requirements, including hybrid-cloud, multi-cloud, and edge computing environments. Provide technical leadership and expertise during customer workshops, proof-of-concept (PoC) engagements, and design reviews.
• Risk Management & Problem Solving: Proactively identify technical risks and challenges during the design and implementation phases, developing strategies to mitigate or resolve these risks while maintaining project timelines and customer expectations.
• Stakeholder Communication: Act as a technical liaison between engineering, product management, sales, and customer-facing teams. Effectively communicate complex architectural concepts to non-technical stakeholders and executives to drive informed decision-making.
• Quality and Compliance: Ensure that the system architecture adheres to company security standards, regulatory requirements, and best practices in software design. Lead efforts to ensure scalability, maintainability, and high availability.
• Documentation & Knowledge Sharing: Lead the creation of high-level architecture documentation, technical specifications, and customer-facing materials. Facilitate internal knowledge sharing to keep teams informed of architectural decisions and product features.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

• Architectural Expertise: Proven experience designing large-scale, high-availability, and fault-tolerant systems. Deep understanding of system architecture principles, distributed computing, cloud infrastructure, and performance optimization.
• Customer-Centric Mindset: Strong focus on customer engagement, with a history of translating customer needs into effective, scalable technical solutions. Comfort in working directly with customers to ensure alignment on both technical and business objectives.
• Advanced Networking and Traffic Management: In-depth knowledge of networking protocols (L2-L4), DNS, global traffic management, and related technologies. Experience in designing systems that efficiently route, balance, and optimize traffic across complex environments.
• Cloud Technologies & Distributed Systems: Expertise in cloud architecture (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), containerization (Kubernetes, Docker), and multi-cloud deployments. Deep understanding of microservices and serverless computing.
• Generative AI & Automation: Experience leveraging cutting-edge technologies such as Generative AI to enhance software systems, improve system efficiency, or create new product capabilities.
• Leadership and Influence: Ability to influence both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Experience leading cross-functional teams and guiding product direction at the architectural level.
• Agile & DevOps Practices: Experience in Agile development processes, CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps practices. Knowledge of how these methodologies can be applied to enhance product delivery and operational efficiency.
• Security & Compliance: Strong understanding of security best practices, compliance standards, and risk management processes. Experience ensuring that system architecture meets industry standards for security and compliance.
• Communication & Documentation: Exceptional communication skills, both written and verbal. Ability to clearly explain complex technical concepts to diverse audiences, including customers, executives, and engineering teams.

Qualifications:

• Experience: A minimum of 12+ years in software engineering, with at least 5 years in a solutions architect or principal engineering role, including substantial experience in customer-facing engagements.
• Education: A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field is required. Advanced degrees (MS or PhD) are a plus.
• Leadership Experience: Proven ability to lead technical teams, influence product and architectural decisions, and mentor senior engineers. Experience managing large-scale engineering projects from conception to delivery.
• Customer-Facing Expertise: Extensive experience working directly with customers to understand their business and technical needs, presenting solutions, and driving technical workshops and PoCs.
• Travel: Occasional travel may be required for customer engagements, technical workshops, and conferences.

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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.

F5 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.