Senior Software Engineer - BIG‑IP
Volterra
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.
Role Summary
At F5, we make apps faster, smarter, and safer…from anywhere.
Join the BIG‑IP Shared Components Team and lead the maintenance and modernization of BIG‑IP’s common binaries, daemons, libraries, and scripting ecosystems. You will set technical direction, drive security and performance standards, and mentor engineers—ensuring our foundation remains robust, 64‑bit ready, and future‑proof.
About the Team
We own the shared pieces everyone depends on. Our mission is to provide secure, stable, and performant building blocks—so BIG‑IP features can innovate without worrying about the platform’s core.
Responsibilities
Own technical strategy and roadmaps for shared binaries/daemons, libraries, and scripting components (Perl/Tcl/Python, JS, Java).
Ensure ABI stability, compatibility, and safe evolution of shared libraries; manage risk during architecture/OS/toolchain changes.
Define and enforce coding standards, quality gates, and test strategies (unit/functional/integration/reliability/perf).
Lead security posture for shared components: SBOM, supply‑chain scanning, patch cadence, and threat modeling.
Drive service operability: health checks, restart semantics, resource limits, observability hooks, rollout/rollback strategies.
Mentor engineers; guide decisions on reuse vs re‑implementation; collaborate across platform, product, QA, and release teams.
Engage with upstream OSS where appropriate; evaluate long‑term viability, licensing, and adoption risks.
Qualifications
Deep Systems Expertise: ELF internals, ABI compatibility, symbol versioning, shared‑lib migration strategies.
Advanced Toolchain & Performance: Compiler/linker optimizations (LTO, PGO), sanitizers (ASan/TSan/UBSan), perf tooling (perf, flame graphs), targeted benchmarking; ability to set performance budgets and regression gates.
Architecture & Reliability: Design for scalability and resilience; establish SLOs and reliability targets for services and libraries.
Security Leadership: Hands‑on with vulnerability management, remediation planning, secure coding reviews, and compliance.
Testing Governance: Define coverage targets and CI gates; lead failure analysis and root‑cause investigations.
Technical Leadership: Roadmapping, estimation, risk management, cross‑team alignment; proven mentorship.
Preferred (Nice‑to‑Have)
At‑scale RPM spec and repository governance; artifact promotion gates.
Prior work with messaging stacks (ZeroMQ, Asio) and graphics/text stacks (Cairo, Pango, Harfbuzz).
Incident response experience; designing resilience improvements and postmortems.
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.