Principal Engineer

F5 Networks • San Jose, CA

4d

About The Position

At F5, the Principal Engineer will provide hands-on technical leadership in building and scaling F5’s AI Security and Delivery Platform. The role owns end-to-end component design, data plane efficiency, control plane integrations, and AI security and traffic delivery controls across multi-cloud and Kubernetes-native infrastructures. The engineer will design, implement, and deploy resilient enterprise AI control-plane and data-plane features; build Kubernetes-native infrastructure and high-performance proxy plugins; and collaborate with product management and platform architects to refine specifications and deliver platform releases. The role also includes mentoring senior and staff engineers, conducting architectural reviews, and setting engineering quality and best-practice standards.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 12 or more years of software engineering experience building high-performance networking, API gateway, application delivery, distributed control plane, or cloud security infrastructure software.
• Strong hands-on programming skills in Go, C, or Rust.
• Demonstrated experience with Kubernetes internals, container orchestration, and multi-cloud networking primitives, including AWS, Azure, GCP, or Private Cloud.
• Solid understanding of the AI Software Development Lifecycle, modern AI application platforms, traffic optimization, and enterprise security protocols.
• Proven ability to drive complex technical projects from concept to production deployment.

Responsibilities

• Design, code, and deploy resilient, scalable features for enterprise AI control planes and data planes using Go, C, and Rust.
• Implement security controls, semantic policy enforcement, rate limiting, load distribution, and observability mechanisms for high-throughput AI workloads and LLM pipelines.
• Build Kubernetes-native operators, custom resource definitions (CRDs), and high-performance proxy plugins for multi-cloud and on-premises environments.
• Mentor senior and staff engineers, conduct architectural reviews, drive code quality standards, and enforce engineering best practices across teams.
• Collaborate with product management and platform architects to refine technical specifications and deliver robust platform releases.
• Drive complex technical projects from concept through production deployment.

Benefits

• Incentive compensation
• Bonus
• Restricted stock units
• Benefits

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal