Principal SRE, Infrastructure & Platform

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.

F5 is bringing a better digital world to life by helping organizations create, secure, and run applications that power our lives. Within the Platform Engineering team, this role helps ensure our platform is   operated   safely, reliably, and with operational excellence.

We’re   looking for a   Principal SRE   who leads with kindness,   operates   well in a global, follow-the-sun environment, and brings strong execution, documentation, and cross-functional coordination skills.   You will   be responsible for   designing, deploying, and   operating   the foundational infrastructure that underpins a large-scale, multi-datacenter platform spanning 30+ Points of Presence across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC.

This is a hands-on engineering role. You will own systems from bare metal to application layer -- provisioning physical servers via out-of-band management, building and maintaining   Proxmox -based hypervisor clusters, managing   containerized   workloads, and driving automation across a heterogeneous on-premises and cloud environment. You will   operate   within a PCI-DSS compliant environment and be expected to contribute to hardening, audit readiness, and security tooling.

You will join an on-call rotation and be expected to respond to and lead incident resolution for production systems across a 24x7 global environment.

What You'll Do

Infrastructure Automation & Configuration Management

- Author,   maintain , and refactor Ansible playbooks and roles across a large-scale multi-datacenter inventory, covering the full lifecycle from bare-metal provisioning to application deployment

- Develop and improve CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI) for infrastructure automation, including linting, testing, and staged rollout across regions

- Manage secrets lifecycle using   HashiCorp   Vault, including   AppRole   authentication, secret rotation, and PKI integration

- Maintain CMDB/IPAM accuracy in   NetBox   as a source of truth for all infrastructure assets

Compute &   Virtualization

- Deploy and manage   Proxmox   VE hypervisor clusters on bare-metal HPE hardware, including cluster formation, OVS networking, ZFS storage, and VM replication

- Provision and lifecycle-manage virtual machines using cloud- init , QCOW2 images, and   Proxmox   API automation

- Manage physical server provisioning end-to-end via HPE   iLO   (firmware updates, SPP deployment, OS installation via virtual media)

Container & Kubernetes Platforms

- Manage self-hosted Kubernetes clusters on-premises, including control plane operations, node provisioning, workload deployment, and upgrade management

- Operate   Docker-based workloads on infrastructure VMs using compose-driven deployments and container health monitoring

- Maintain   container image pipelines and registry infrastructure (Azure Container Registry   or AWS ECR )

Cloud Platforms

- Engineer and   maintain   infrastructure on AWS and Azure, integrating cloud resources with on-premises systems (DNS, monitoring, identity, networking)

- Apply cloud cost awareness, security best practices, and   IaC   principles (IAM, security groups, networking, storage) across AWS and Azure environments

Networking & Core Services

- Operate   and troubleshoot core distributed services including authoritative DNS (BIND9), recursive DNS (Unbound), load balancing ( HAProxy ), and high-availability VIPs ( Keepalived /VRRP)

- Maintain   directory services ( OpenLDAP   master-replica topology) and AAA infrastructure ( FreeRADIUS ) used for SSH, VPN, and network device authentication

- Manage OVS-based network configurations, VLAN topologies, and bonded NIC arrangements across hypervisor fleets

Observability & Security

- Maintain   and extend monitoring infrastructure (Prometheus,   Observium ) across a global fleet including SNMP polling, metrics collection, and alerting

- Manage   centralised   log aggregation pipelines ( Fluentbit ) and ensure log delivery integrity across DCs

- Operate   runtime security tooling (Falco) and file integrity monitoring (AIDE) in production environments

- Support PCI-DSS compliance activities including CIS hardening, audit logging ( auditd ), and participation in control reviews

Reliability & Incident Response

- Participate   in a 24x7 on-call rotation, responding to and leading production incident resolution

- Conduct blameless post-mortems and drive remediation of root causes through automation and system improvements

- Define and track SLOs/SLIs for critical infrastructure services

- Identify   and address single points of failure; design and implement HA improvements

What We're Looking For

Required

- 7 + years of experience in a Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or Infrastructure Engineering role in a production environment

- Strong Linux systems administration skills (RHEL/CentOS preferred) including   systemd , networking, storage, kernel tuning, and package management

- Proficiency   with Ansible   (or similar tool)   for large-scale configuration management, including role design, inventory management, and CI/CD integration

- Hands-on experience with at least one hypervisor platform, preferably   Proxmox   VE , Harvester ( Kubevirt )   or similar (VMware vSphere, KVM)

- Production experience   operating   on-premise   Kubernetes clusters ( rke2, k3s,   et c )

- Practical AWS   or   Azure experience including   compute , networking (VPC/ VNet , security groups, DNS), IAM, and managed services

- Solid understanding of networking fundamentals: VLANs, bonding/LAG, routing, BGP concepts, DNS, load balancing, and   firewall   rule management

- Experience with secrets management platforms ( HashiCorp   Vault or equivalent)

- Familiarity with PCI-DSS requirements as they apply to infrastructure -- hardening standards (CIS benchmarks), audit logging, access control

- Experience writing and   maintaining   CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or equivalent)

- Demonstrable on-call experience and comfort leading incident response in a global production environment

Preferred

- Experience managing bare-metal server fleets including out-of-band management tools (HPE   iLO , IPMI, or equivalent)

- Experience with CMDB/IPAM tooling

- Working knowledge of LDAP directory services and RADIUS authentication

- Exposure to network monitoring tooling ( Observium ,   LibreNMS , or similar SNMP-based platforms)

- Scripting   proficiency   in Python or Bash for tooling and automation tasks

- Experience   operating   in colocation / carrier-neutral data   center   environments (Equinix, Interxion, or similar)

What You'll Need to Succeed

- Comfort   o perating   autonomously in a globally distributed, remote-first team across multiple time zones

- A bias toward automation: if   you've   done something manually twice, you should be automating it

- Strong written communication skills -- you will document systems, write runbooks, and produce post-mortems

- The ability to context-switch between strategic work (architecture improvements, tooling development) and urgent operational issues (incident response)

- Willingness to   participate   in a 24x7 on-call rotation with a fair and well-supported rota tion

Nice to Have

- Experience with   OSTree   / atomic update workflows for OS lifecycle management

- Familiarity with DDoS mitigation platforms ( Corero   or similar)

- Exposure to BGP route reflector concepts and network-function   virtualization

- Experience with Pulp or other on-premises RPM/package repository management systems

- Contributions to open-source infrastructure tooling

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] .