Principal Engineer – AI Specialist

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.

Key Responsibilities

AI System Innovation & Design

• Lead the design and deployment of advanced AI-driven systems and models, including GPT-based solutions (GPT-4.x, OpenAI APIs), reinforcement learning frameworks, and autonomous agentic workflows.
• Develop intelligent agents capable of handling complex tasks, decision-making, and automating workflows within F5 products and platforms.
• Enable generative AI capabilities, such as personalization, contextual understanding, natural language processing (NLP), and decision systems.
• Research and integrate state-of-the-art AI techniques, including transformer models, GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks), and hybrid AI architectures.

Distributed AI Systems & Observability

• Develop and optimize large-scale distributed AI infrastructure, ensuring fault tolerance, resilience, scalability, and performance in global workloads.
• Implement advanced observability systems for AI applications, leveraging telemetry pipelines (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Prometheus) and ensuring data quality validation.
• Create frameworks for real-time anomaly detection, predictive analytics, and failure recovery simulation in AI systems.

Automation, Infrastructure, & Performance

• Build frameworks for automated data ingestion, transformation, and validation at scale across distributed systems (e.g., Kafka, Flink, Spark).
• Ensure robust CI/CD pipelines tailored for AI workflows, including validation, automation, and monitoring for model updates and deployments.
• Design synthetic data generation tools for model benchmarking, stress testing, and performance analysis of high-volume data sets and queries.
• Implement chaos engineering and resilience testing for AI-driven cloud environments (Kubernetes, Docker, Helm).

Leadership, Strategy, & Collaboration

• Create best-in-class AI architecture roadmaps, ensuring alignment with organizational goals and the latest advancements in AI technology.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, SRE, and DevOps teams to embed AI capabilities into the SDLC, promoting quality and efficiency at every stage.
• Mentor engineering teams on AI development, distributed system reliability, and automation strategies, fostering innovation and collaboration across teams.
• Investigate production issues, contributing to root cause analysis, remediation, and future-proofing AI systems.

Skills and Requirements

• Advanced AI Expertise:

  • 10+ years of hands-on experience in AI research, development, and deployment, including expertise in generative AI (GPT-4.x), transformer models, and reinforcement learning.
  • Proficiency in natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, predictive analytics, decision systems, and multi-agent frameworks.
  • Familiarity with cutting-edge AI techniques such as GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks), hybrid transformers, sequence modeling (RNNs, LSTMs), and unsupervised learning approaches.
  • Expertise in building multi-modal AI systems capable of handling text, images, audio, and structured data.
  • Proven experience in advanced AI tooling and platforms (e.g., Hugging Face Transformers, LangChain, DeepMind frameworks, AI interpretability tools, RASA conversational systems).

• Cloud-Native & Distributed AI Systems:

  • Deep working knowledge of distributed systems architecture, including large-scale data pipelines (e.g., Kafka, Flink, Spark), data lakes (ClickHouse, Iceberg, S3), and storage optimization techniques.
  • Experience in MLOps practices, including model lifecycle management, scaling, retraining, and deployment in production environments.
  • Proven expertise in Kubernetes, OpenShift, Terraform, and Helm for automating AI system deployment and scaling across multi-cloud infrastructures.

• Performance Optimization & Observability:

  • Strong knowledge of fault tolerance, latency optimization, and large-scale AI infrastructure monitoring using Prometheus, Grafana, and Datadog.
  • Advanced experience with anomaly detection, predictive modeling, and telemetry validation applied to distributed AI systems.

• Programming & Development:

  • Proficiency in Python, Go, JavaScript, or similar programming languages for creating robust AI workflows and solutions.
  • Experience with benchmarking tools (Locust, Gatling, JMeter) and frameworks for AI performance testing at scale.
  • Ability to design customized AI APIs and algorithms to optimize automation workflows.

• Leadership & Soft Skills:

  • Proven ability to mentor and lead teams of engineers, QA specialists, and developers in adopting advanced AI practices.
  • Strategic mindset to align technical solutions with business goals, incorporating cutting-edge AI advancements to solve complex challenges.
  • Excellent communication skills for engaging stakeholders, presenting on AI strategies, and fostering cross-functional collaboration.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related field with 10+ years of relevant experience.
• Advanced certification and hands-on expertise in AI/ML and cloud systems (e.g., AWS Certified Machine Learning, Microsoft Azure AI Engineer, Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer).
• Experience with advanced AI tools (e.g., TensorFlow Extended for full-cycle pipelines, Hugging Face, DeepMind R&D frameworks).
• Strong background in ethical AI governance, bias mitigation, and trusted AI principles for real-world applications.
• Familiarity with conversational AI systems (RASA, Dialogflow) and agent-building tools (LangChain, OpenAI AutoGPT).

F5 Inc. is an equal opportunity employer and strongly supports diversity in the workplace.

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.