Principal Software Development 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 looking for a Principal Software Engineer with deep experience in distributed networking systems and routing control-plane development. This role will define and evolve core networking intelligence for our platform — including routing logic, policy orchestration, state synchronization, and multi-cloud connectivity behavior.

You’ll operate as a hands-on technical leader, driving architectural direction, mentoring engineers, and ensuring that our networking control-plane is scalable, resilient, and operationally transparent across global environments.

What You’ll Do

- Design and develop routing control-plane services, including route computation, convergence handling, topology abstraction, configuration modeling, and distributed reconciliation logic.

- Build and evolve networking intelligence for service-to-service routing, connectivity policies, traffic segmentation, and cross-region/multi-tenant behavior.

- Define system architecture supporting high availability, deterministic failover, scale-out routing state distribution, and consistent configuration propagation across clusters and sites.

- Lead design reviews, influence engineering patterns, and ensure correctness, observability, and operational readiness of networking components.

- Develop testing strategies for route scale, convergence timing, configuration drift, and failure simulation under realistic networking conditions.

- Build tooling for debuggability, policy traceability, routing event visibility, and operational workflows used in production environments.

- Partner with product, platform, and cloud networking teams to ensure alignment with AWS, Azure, and GCP networking primitives including routing boundaries, private connectivity, service routing, and hybrid/cloud edge patterns.

- Mentor teams and drive engineering excellence in networking, distributed systems, and cloud-native design.