Senior Principal Software Engineer - L3 Routing Control Plane

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 are building a distributed cloud Services (XC) platform to support large-scale, high-performance, and highly available services across multi-cloud environments. The Control Plane Team at F5 is seeking an experienced Senior Principal Engineer with deep technical knowledge of BGP routing, networking fundamentals, and distributed systems. You will work on the development and lifecycle of a multi-cloud distributed platform, primarily within AWS environments, leveraging Kubernetes (K8s) for orchestration.

The ideal candidate will have deep technical expertise in BGP, iBGP, networking fundamentals, and distributed systems, particularly in AWS environments with Kubernetes orchestration. You will be responsible for designing and implementing scalable and resilient control and data plane solutions while bringing leadership experience and technical acumen to influence the future direction of our product.Key Responsibilities

• Lead control path development for the XC product line, focusing on scalability and high availability in distributed cloud environments.
• Design and implement scalable, high-performance solutions for control plane.
• Technically lead major system components in distributed systems, from design to implementation.
• Create and maintain functional specifications and design documents to clearly communicate design decisions and solutions.
• Proactively identify and resolve key technical challenges related to performance, security, and scalability.
• Continuously improve the performance and reliability of the platform, ensuring it meets operational demands.
• Investigate and propose solutions to security vulnerabilities within the platform, including third-party integrations.
• Mentor junior engineers and serve as a source of technical expertise across the team.
• Communicate effectively with internal stakeholders, presenting complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Qualifications

• 14+ years of software engineering experience, with 10+ years in designing and implementing large-scale distributed systems.
• Prior experience in cloud technologies, particularly AWS, Kubernetes (K8s), and distributed, scalable systems and their deployment models, with a focus on scalability, performance, and security.
• Deep expertise in BGP and IPSec routing, as well as networking fundamentals (TCP, UDP, L4-L7, HTTP, BGP, IPSec).
• Experience with cloud networking platforms and commercial BGP routing solutions.
• Strong coding proficiency in C++/Golang, with a proven track record of leading complex software development efforts.
• Hands-on experience with Docker, K8s, and microservices architecture in cloud environments.
• Strong architectural skills in designing highly available, real-time systems in distributed environments.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and leadership skills, with the ability to lead and mentor teams effectively.

Nice to have:

• Experience with Route Reflectors and BGP Confederations for managing complex BGP deployments in large-scale environments.
• Understanding of route dampening, BGP path attributes, and BGP synchronization techniques.
• Ability to solve complex engineering problems, making decisions that balance trade-offs and ensure optimal customer outcomes.

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: $207,279.00 - $310,919.00

F5 maintains broad salary ranges