Software Engineer III

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.

About the team

NGINX Gateway Fabric is an open-source project that implements the Gateway API using NGINX as its data plane. Our project is delivered as a Docker container running in a Kubernetes cluster and provides an HTTP, TCP/UDP load balancer, reverse proxy, or API Gateway for Kubernetes applications. We operate entirely in the open, with a public sprint board, roadmap, meetings, and open-source code.

Position Summary

F5's NGINX Business Unit is seeking a Software Engineer III primarily located in Cork to join our Nginx Gateway Fabric team. In this role, you will work on cutting-edge cloud-native networking technologies, contributing to the development of an open-source product that integrates deeply with Kubernetes, containers, and NGINX. You will own the entire lifecycle of this product—from design and development to testing, deployment, and documentation. As part of our open-source community, your contributions will be public, allowing you to showcase your work and collaborate with a global network of engineers. You will collaborate with peers under the direction of technical leads on assigned project teams.

Responsibilities:

Collaborate within team and with cross-functional teams to ensure continuous delivery of high-quality code in an open source environment.

Research, Design, develop, and maintain enhancements for NGINX Gateway Fabric. Participate in asynchronous code reviews, testing, and documentation efforts to ensure reliability and usabilit

Document software designs via functional specifications and other design document

Proactively and openly communicate status, plan-of-action, and resolution of issues.

Work within a Kubernetes-based ecosystem, Gateway API, and improve its integration with NGINX.

Work closely with senior engineers, and Architects to refine architectural decision.

Conduct presentations and demos internally and externally as needed.

Attend and participate in the Gateway API community meetings, PRs, and proposals, to help guide the community towards a better Gateway API for everyone.

Responsible for upholding F5’s Business Code of Ethics and for promptly reporting violations of the Code or other company policies.

Required Skills

7+ years of experience with a Computer Science background or equivalent professional experience.

Strong proficiency in Go, Docker, and Kubernetes, with hands-on experience developing Kubernetes controllers operators.

An understanding of Kubernetes internals, including API server interactions, controllers, reconciliation loops, and CRDs.

Knowledge of Kubernetes networking concepts, including Ingress, Gateway API, Service Mesh, and traffic rout mechanisms.

Strong knowledge of networking protocols, including HTTP, gRPC, TCP, and UDP, and their role in Kubernetes-based traffic manageme

Strong knowledge of networking policies, such as rate limiting, circuit breaking, and access control.

Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools such as Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, and Fluentd for analyzing application behavior. Experience with distributed systems and event-driven architectures.

Expertise in Kubernetes cloud environments.

Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills.

Proficiency in writing clean, efficient, and testable code, with experience in unit and functional tes Experience with GitOps and CI/CD pipelines, including writing and maintaining YAML-based automation and deployment configuration.

Strong problem-solving skills, with the ability to diagnose, reproduce, and resolve customer-reported issues.

Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal, with the ability to document architecture, APIs, and operational workflow.

Self-motivated and able to work independently, while thriving in a collaborative, open-source, and agile team environment.

Experience contributing to open-source Kubernetes projects is good to have.

Qualifications

Bachelor’s or advanced degree; and/or equivalent work experience.

7+ years of experience in relevant roles.

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.

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 employment, including, but not limited to, hiring, job assignment, compensation, promotion, benefits, training, disciplin and termination.  F5 offers a variety of reasonable accommodations for candidates. Requesting an accommodation 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 [email protected].

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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 [email protected].