Principal Software Engineer Distributed Cloud

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.

Joel Hendrickson:

Principal Software Engineer, Distributed Cloud

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 Distributed Cloud Platform.

This role is for a senior technical leader who thrives in complex, large-scale distributed systems and has a proven track record of designing, developing, and delivering production-grade cloud 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 highly available, distributed services for F5’s Distributed Cloud Platform.
• Drive architectural decisions, ensuring scalability, performance, and security across multi-cloud and edge 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 distributed systems development.
• Act as a thought leader for distributed cloud services internally and externally, including technical blogs, whitepapers, and conference presentations.
  
  
  

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software development experience, including 5+ years building distributed systems at scale.
• 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 architectures, microservices, Kubernetes, and containerized workloads.
• Deep understanding of networking, security, APIs, and data consistency models in distributed environments.
• 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.
• Familiarity with distributed data stores, messaging systems, and event-driven architectures.
• Contributions to open-source projects related to distributed systems, networking, or cloud computing.
  
  
  

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 accommodations@f5.com.

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