Principal DevOps 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.

Position Summary

F5 is seeking a highly experienced Principal DevOps Engineer to modernize how F5 software is built, tested, secured, and delivered, with technical leadership across CI/CD, source control, build systems, developer productivity, and software supply-chain security.

A key focus is migrating large, mature codebases from Perforce to GitLab and modernizing the supporting ecosystem through centralized CI/CD runners, Artifactory-backed artifact management, stronger SDLC controls, and reproducible builds.

Primary Responsibilities

Architecture and Strategy

• Define the CI/CD architecture and strategy, serving as the organization’s primary technical expert.
• Develop a strategic roadmap that incorporates emerging business and industry trends into development pipelines.
• Establish and maintain CI/CD standards, patterns, design methodologies, technologies, and architectural guardrails that help product teams reliably launch products and services.
• Partner with product architects to define quality checkpoints and ensure inputs meet quality standards and align with the architecture strategy.

Platform Reliability, Security, and Delivery

• Establish infrastructure monitoring, alerting, version management, and security controls to support engineering products and services.
• Implement real-time pipeline monitoring to identify, analyze, and resolve issues.
• Partner with the security organization and CISO to ensure CI/CD pipelines and related services follow security best practices and meet compliance requirements, including ISO 27001.
• Drive tooling and ecosystem integrations to enable seamless build publishing.

Technical Leadership and Collaboration

• Promote adoption of architectural guardrails across the technology domains that support product delivery.
• Regularly communicate the company’s technical capabilities and future direction to senior management and senior external stakeholders.
• Mentor junior team members.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

CI/CD, Source Control, and Build Systems

• Expertise in architecting and implementing CI/CD pipelines that enable daily releases.
• Experience migrating very large or historically complex Perforce depots to Git.
• Experience with Bazel or Buck2 build systems and GitLab autoscaling runners and large-scale runner fleets.
• Experience with Artifactory, container registries, and dependency-management infrastructure.

Infrastructure, Security, and Domain Expertise

• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Experience with HashiCorp Vault and enterprise secrets management.
• Experience modernizing build and release systems for networking, infrastructure, security, embedded, or systems software.
• Internal and external recognition as a leading technical, industry, or product specialist.

Qualifications

Architecture and Delivery Experience

• Experience designing and implementing enterprise-scale CI/CD pipelines with 99.9999% uptime.
• Extensive experience architecting, developing, and deploying distributed, microservices-based applications across multiple clouds.
• Experience architecting and delivering multi-cloud solutions on AWS, Azure, vSphere, OpenStack, and Kubernetes.
• Demonstrated depth and breadth across related disciplines, including networking, security, and other technology domains.
• Experience leading architecture in an agile DevOps model, ideally across multiple product releases and development cycles.
• Ability to explain complex concepts to decision-makers and help shape technology strategy.

Education and Experience

One of the following combinations, or equivalent experience, is required:

• Bachelor’s degree and at least 10 years of related experience.
• Master’s degree and at least 8 years of related 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 accommodations@f5.com.