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.

Principal Software Engineer – Routing Control Plane & Distributed Cloud Networking

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.

What You Bring

• Strong hands-on experience building networking systems with a focus on routing logic, distributed state management, or networking control-plane development.
• Practical experience with one or more advanced networking concepts such as:
  route policy frameworks, peering models, routing state machines, L3VPNs, EVPN-style overlays, or distributed topology management.
  (Experience may include open-source stacks, commercial routers, SDN controllers, or cloud networking platforms.)
• Solid understanding of distributed system fundamentals including eventual consistency, consensus models (e.g., Raft), cluster coordination, and state synchronization patterns is a strong plus
• Experience with cloud-native networking (Kubernetes networking, service routing, intent-based networking, or large-scale multi-cloud connectivity models).
• Strong Linux fundamentals including namespaces, networking internals, and debugging of runtime behavior in distributed systems.
• Proven track record driving architecture, improving platform reliability, and mentoring engineering teams.
• Strong analytical and debugging skills, especially in scenarios involving dynamic routing behavior, distributed failures, or configuration-driven networking logic.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in software engineering with a focus on networking control-plane development, distributed networking systems, SDN, or cloud network orchestration.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent hands-on industry experience.

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.

Please note that F5 only contacts candidates through F5 email address (ending with @f5.com) or auto email notification from Workday (ending with f5.com or @myworkday.com).

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 [email protected].