Senior Principal Engineer

F5 Networks•San Jose, CA

About The Position

At F5, teams empower organizations to create, secure, and run applications. The company focuses on cybersecurity and improving the experiences of its customers and their customers, while fostering a diverse community. As a Senior Principal Engineer, you will serve as a primary technical authority driving the architecture, strategy, and execution of F5’s next-generation AI Security and Delivery Platform. You will design high-performance, resilient, and secure control plane and data plane architectures to safeguard, optimize, deliver, and route critical traffic across enterprise AI workloads and modern application infrastructure in hybrid public and private cloud environments. The job description is intended as a general representation of the responsibilities and requirements and may not be all-inclusive. Responsibilities and requirements are subject to change.

Requirements

Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent experience.
15+ years of software engineering experience, with architectural leadership in enterprise networking, cloud security, API/gateway infrastructure, or application delivery platforms.
Advanced proficiency in Go, C, and Rust for high-performance system-level and network software development.
Deep experience in distributed control plane design, high-performance data plane packet processing, application delivery controllers (ADCs), reverse proxies, and API management systems.
Deep knowledge of Kubernetes architecture, custom controllers, container networking, and multi-cloud infrastructure, including AWS, Azure, GCP, and private cloud.
Solid understanding of the AI Software Development Lifecycle, AI application workloads, enterprise AI security frameworks, and traffic delivery dynamics.

Responsibilities

Define the overall architectural vision and long-term technical roadmap for F5’s AI security, application delivery, intelligent traffic routing, and control plane technologies.
Architect and lead implementation of high-throughput, low-latency data plane and distributed control plane systems using Go, C, and Rust.
Integrate platform infrastructure with the AI software development lifecycle, including runtime protection, prompt/response scanning, model-serving delivery, vector stores, and orchestration frameworks.
Lead multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud architecture designs using Kubernetes CRDs, ingress/gateway controllers, service meshes, and cloud-native network topologies across public and private cloud environments.
Partner with executive leadership, product management, and engineering teams to translate business requirements into technical specifications and execution plans.