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.

F5 Networks sits between the Internet and some of the largest companies on Earth. We keep their applications running fast, safe, and efficiently. F5’s hardware and software products are highly configurable and blazingly fast. The Rapid Development Team (RDT) is the customer‑facing side of F5 Product Engineering and has the charter to keep our existing clientele happy. RDT accomplishes this through two major arenas – diagnosing and resolving the hardest customer issues using a dedicated group of elite software engineers who thrive on the hunt.

Successful RDT developers solve difficult unique problems, can multi‑task efficiently, communicate calmly, and enjoy playing the hero.

RDT has a unique perspective within F5. Our Software Engineers understand the product in its entirety – not only how the features work but how they work together. This makes RDT engineers highly valued e of the best engineers at F5 work for or have worked for RDT.

This position is responsible for the identification, evaluation, and solution of complex software issues. Must also be able to design, develop, and maintain high‑quality code for product components. Perform as an individual contributor and collaborate with peers under the direction of technical leads on assigned project teams. Requires little direct management to complete most of the development tasks.

• Evaluate and solve software failures
• Improve the existing functionality
• Work cross‑functionally integrating, testing and debugging issues with existing system‑wide software
• Collaborate with team members and technical leads
• Build tools and infrastructure to improve F5’s components and features
• Perform other related duties as assigned

Essential:

• Strong understanding of data structures and algorithms
• Strong expertise in Layer 2/3 forwarding logic and core networking protocols, including the implementation and troubleshooting of routing (BGP, OSPF) and complex encapsulation/tunneling schemas (VXLAN, MPLS, IKE, GRE)
• Experience with network and web technologies such as TCP, UDP, IP, HTTP, L4‑L7, DNS and such
• Hands‑on programming experience in any one of C, C++ or Go
• Excellent analytic / troubleshooting and debugging skills
• Experience programming in Linux networking and OS internals
• Demonstrated excellence in written and verbal communications
• Strong expertise in performing analysis of the data path within Kubernetes environments. Candidates must be proficient in isolating performance bottlenecks, diagnosing intermittent packet drops, and resolving regressions within the container networking stack.
• Proven ability to reproduce complex customer network topologies to simulate and validate high‑throughput workloads

Nice‑to‑have:

• Experience with one or more scripting language such as Python, shell script, JavaScript and/or node.js
• Experience in high performance data plane proxies such as Envoy, HAProxy or Nginx
• Experience with DPDK or eBPF frameworks
• Experience in production alerts management and using dashboards to debug issues
• Expertise in utilizing Kibana, Grafana, and Loki to analyze system telemetry and high‑cardinality data
• Skilled in constructing complex queries (LogQL , Lucene, KQL) to build specialized dashboards

Typically requires a minimum of 5 years of related experience with a bachelor's degree; or 3 years and a master's degree; or a PhD with 1 year of experience; or equivalent work experience.

• Empowered Work Culture:
  Experience an environment that values autonomy, fostering a culture where creativity and ownership are encouraged.
• Continuous…