Principal Software 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 - Platform F5 is the global leader in delivering and securing every app and API. Trusted by Global Fortune 500 companies, F5 keeps applications and APIs fast, available, and secure across the complex hybrid multicloud environments where modern digital business operates. Through the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) , F5 converges application delivery and security — spanning data centers, private clouds, public clouds, SaaS platforms, edge environments, and emerging AI architectures — to reduce complexity, strengthen resilience, and protect digital experiences at scale.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join our ADSP - F5 Connector program team in Bangalore. The F5 Connector is a critical architectural component of the ADSP — it provides the bridge between customer on-premises and cloud-deployed infrastructure (BIG-IP, Kubernetes clusters, edge sites) and F5's cloud-native SaaS services. As a Principal Engineer, you will own the architecture, performance, and reliability of the connector's data plane and control plane. This is a high-performance, systems-level role requiring deep expertise in Rust / C++ to build software that operates at massive scale. Your work includes, but not limited to, Research, design and build highly reliable, available and scalable platforms, API definition, implementation, deployment, operational management, and debugging Roles and Responsibilities: 12+ years of experience in software engineering in a fast-paced environment with most recent 3+ years as Architect or Principal Engineer with ability to architect & design large scale enterprise class platforms in microservice based solution and architectural style. Hands-on coding in Rust / C++, be able to conceptualize and develop prototype quickly - Drive technical roadmap of the team in collaboration with Engineering and Product. Leverage AI to write code that adheres to the requirements, is cost-effective and maintainable. Familiarity with the OpenTelemetry Arrow Protocol (OTAP) for efficient, columnar-encoded transport of telemetry data, including schema negotiation and stream lifecycle management Grasp of bi-directional (bidi) streaming via gRPC, including flow control, multiplexed streams, back-pressure handling, and long-lived connection management in distributed collector topologies Added plus: Experience with Apache Arrow columnar memory format and its application to high-throughput, zero-copy data interchange across analytics and observability workloads Own the end-to-end architecture of the F5 Connector, encompassing the data plane (high-throughput packet/request processing, traffic inspection, telemetry collection) and control plane (policy synchronization, configuration management, service registration with F5 Distributed Cloud). Mentor senior and junior engineers across Bangalore and global teams; Perform code reviews, set coding practices and guidelines within the team Experience working with all the phases of a development cycle for a software product from understanding requirements, going through design, development, deploy phases and maintenance. Work with geographically distributed teams 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