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 under