Software Development Engineer III - Agentic AI

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.

Who We Are

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—protecting consumers from fraud and enabling companies to focus on innovation.

Everything we do centers around people. We obsess over improving the lives of our customers (and their customers), and we prioritize a diverse F5 community where each individual can thrive.

BeF5 + LeadF5 (How We Show Up)

This role is grounded in F5’s BeF5 and LeadF5 principles: you put customers at the center, operate with ownership and accountability, build trust through inclusive collaboration, and raise the bar through technical excellence and continuous learning. You lead through influence—clarifying direction, aligning teams, and delivering outcomes with integrity.

Position Summary

F5 is seeking an exceptional senior individual contributor to design and implement agentic experiences on F5’s Distributed Cloud Platform (F5XC). You will help create reliable, secure, and scalable agentic systems—spanning user experience, APIs, orchestration, evaluation, safety controls, and operational readiness. This role blends deep distributed-systems engineering with applied AI engineering to deliver production-grade agentic workflows customers can trust.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and build agentic experiences: Design and implement end-to-end agentic workflows (planning, tool-use, memory, retrieval, execution, and feedback loops) that are secure, observable, and reliable in production.
• Platform-grade implementation: Deliver services/APIs that enable agentic capabilities on a multi-tenant SaaS platform, with strong guarantees around latency, scale, resiliency, and manageability.
• Safety, security, and trust: Build guardrails for agentic behavior (policy enforcement, prompt/tool security, secrets handling, auditability, abuse prevention, and data boundaries) aligned with F5’s security mission.
• Evaluation and quality: Define and automate evaluation strategies for agentic systems (offline test suites, regression harnesses, golden tasks, telemetry-driven iteration, and failure-mode analysis).
• Operational excellence: Own reliability—instrumentation, tracing, debugging, runbooks, incident response learnings, and continuous improvement for agentic services in production.
• Cross-functional leadership: Partner with Product, UX, Security, SRE, and Engineering teams across geographies to define requirements, shape roadmaps, and deliver customer value.
• Mentorship and influence: Raise engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, technical guidance, and by modeling inclusive collaboration and ownership.

Required Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• Deep distributed systems expertise: Proven experience designing highly available, scalable services with strong operational rigor (resiliency patterns, rate limiting, backpressure, multi-region considerations).
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: Expertise in one or more of Golang, Python, Java (or similar), with production-quality coding, testing, and API design practices.
• Agentic systems experience: Hands-on experience building agentic applications/services (tool orchestration, function calling/tool APIs, RAG patterns, memory strategies, planning/execution loops, and failure recovery).
• Security mindset: Understanding of common risks and mitigations in agentic/LLM systems (prompt injection, data exfiltration, tool misuse, authorization boundaries, tenant isolation).
• Cloud-native proficiency: Experience with major cloud providers (AWS/Azure/GCP) and cloud-native architectures.
• Containers and orchestration: Strong experience with Docker and Kubernetes (deployment patterns, image lifecycle, service networking, scaling strategies).
• CI/CD and engineering hygiene: Git-based workflows, modern CI/CD, automated testing, and release discipline.
• Data systems: Hands-on experience with SQL and/or NoSQL technologies and designing data access patterns for scale and correctness.
• Communication and collaboration: Clear written/verbal communication; ability to align stakeholders, document decisions, and drive execution across teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building multi-tenant SaaS platform services and/or edge/distributed compute offerings.
• Experience with L3–L7 networking concepts relevant to secure application delivery (identity, routing, policy enforcement, gateways).
• Experience building developer platforms/SDKs for AI or workflow orchestration.
• Familiarity with observability stacks (metrics, logs, traces) and operating production systems at scale.

Education & Experience

Typically requires 8+ years of related experience with a bachelor’s degree; or 6+ years with a master’s degree (or equivalent practical experience).

Why You’ll Love This Role

• Ownership with impact: Build foundational agentic capabilities that shape how customers securely operate modern applications.
• High-caliber collaboration: Work with talented, kind peers across Engineering, Product, UX, Security, and SRE.
• Growth-focused environment: Freedom to learn, experiment responsibly, and continuously raise the bar—while staying grounded in customer outcomes and operational excellence.

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.