Principal 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.

Principal Software Development Engineer - Virtualization & Lab Infrastructure

Location: Hyderabad, India

Role Summary

We are seeking an experienced Principal Engineer to lead the architecture, design, and evolution of our lab infrastructure and virtualization platforms. This role will partner closely with engineering teams and lab users to understand requirements and deliver scalable, reliable, and highly automated infrastructure solutions that support development, testing, CI/CD, and product validation environments.

The successful candidate will provide technical leadership across virtualization, private cloud, automation, and hybrid cloud technologies, while helping drive infrastructure modernization through automation and operational excellence.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for lab virtualization platforms.
• Partner with engineering teams and stakeholders to understand requirements and design scalable infrastructure solutions.
• Lead the design, deployment, and lifecycle management of virtualization and private cloud environments.
• Drive infrastructure automation, self-service capabilities, and operational efficiency.
• Define architecture standards, best practices, and long-term technology strategy.
• Evaluate and adopt technologies that improve reliability, scalability, performance, and user experience.
• Serve as the technical escalation point for complex infrastructure and virtualization challenges.
• Mentor engineers and provide technical leadership across platform and infrastructure initiatives.

Technical Expertise

Virtualization & Private Cloud

• Expert-level experience with VMware vSphere/ESXi, OpenStack, OpenShift Virtualization, Proxmox, XCP-ng, and Microsoft Hyper-V.
• Experience designing and operating large-scale virtualized and private cloud environments.
• Strong understanding of clustering, high availability, workload management, resource optimization, and virtual networking.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot and resolve complex virtualization platform issues.

Automation & Platform Engineering

• Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and platform automation.
• Hands-on experience with tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Python, PowerShell, or similar technologies.
• Experience building automated provisioning, deployment, monitoring, and operational workflows.
• Familiarity with CI/CD integration and self-service infrastructure platforms.

Infrastructure Knowledge

• Understanding of enterprise storage technologies, including NAS, SAN, iSCSI, NFS, SMB, and Fibre Channel (FC).
• Foundational networking knowledge required to design and troubleshoot virtualization platforms, including VLANs, routing, switching, and virtual networking concepts.
• Strong understanding of Azure, AWS, and hybrid cloud environments spanning on-premises and public cloud platforms.
• Experience with AI-assisted operations, intelligent automation, and AI-driven runbooks is a plus.

Qualifications

• 14+ years of experience in virtualization, infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, cloud, or related disciplines.
• Proven experience designing, implementing, and operating large-scale infrastructure platforms.
• Strong architecture, troubleshooting, and problem-solving skills across virtualization, compute, storage, networking, and cloud technologies.
• Experience working directly with engineering teams to gather requirements and deliver infrastructure solutions.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Experience supporting engineering labs, private cloud environments, or product development organizations is highly desirable.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Kubernetes, OpenShift, containers, and cloud-native technologies.
• Familiarity with observability, monitoring, capacity planning, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices.
• Relevant certifications in virtualization, cloud, networking, or storage technologies are a plus.

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.