Principal Engineer, Software

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.

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're looking for a Principal Software Engineer who will provide technical vision, leadership, and hands-on expertise to deliver high-scale, high-performance software for our BIG-IP portfolio of products.

We are seeking a senior technical leader with expertise in complex, large-scale network infrastructure and systems. The ideal candidate has a demonstrated history of successfully designing, developing, and delivering production-grade application delivery services.

You'll collaborate closely with product managers, architects, and engineers across multiple teams to shape the technical direction, ensure architectural integrity, and guide our engineering teams toward building resilient, performant, and secure software.

What You'll Do

• Lead the design and development of high performance, secure and scalable software for F5's BIG-IP control plane and related platform.

• Drive architectural decisions, ensuring scalability, performance, and security across multi-cloud and on-prem deployments.

• Mentor and guide senior and mid-level engineers, promoting engineering excellence and best practices.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams—including Product, UX, and Site

• Reliability Engineering—to translate business requirements into robust, maintainable technical solutions.

• Evaluate emerging technologies, frameworks, and approaches to improve the platform's capabilities and developer productivity.

• Lead deep technical reviews of architecture, design, and code to ensure the highest quality deliverables.

• Partner with leadership to set technical roadmaps and standards for network systems development.

• Act as a thought leader for BIG-IP internally and externally, including technical blogs, whitepapers, and conference presentations.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software development experience, including 5+ years building network infrastructure.

• Proven expertise in at least one modern programming language (Go, Java, Python, or similar) and proficiency in multi-threaded and asynchronous programming.

• Strong experience with cloud-native architecture, microservices, Kubernetes, and containerized workloads.

• Deep understanding of networking, security, APIs, and data consistency modern application delivery.

• Demonstrated success in technical leadership roles, influencing cross-team architecture and delivering complex projects.

• Solid experience with CI/CD pipelines, observability, and operational excellence practices.

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with multi-cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and hybrid environments.

• Network control plane design in a highly scalable and fault tolerant environment.

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.

The annual base pay for this position is: $186, $279,600.00

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:

. 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 ) or auto email notification from Workday (ending with or ).

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

.