Senior F5 Network Engineer

Job Title - Senior F5 Network Engineer
Locations: Lafayette, LA | Knoxville, TN | Birmingham, AL | Columbia, SC
Work Arrangement: Hybrid
Employment Type: Full time
Experience Required: 5+ years
Position Overview
We are seeking a Senior F5 Network Engineer with deep, hands-on expertise in F5 BIG IP LTM and GTM/DNS to support a large scale, highly available financial services environment. F5 is the primary technology for this position, and candidates must have significant recent experience managing, troubleshooting, upgrading, and optimizing complex enterprise F5 environments.
This is a senior level engineering role focused on the F5 load balancing and application delivery infrastructure, including physical and virtual F5 platforms. The engineer will support infrastructure modernization, F5 platform replacements, configuration migrations, upgrades, patching, security hardening, capacity planning, and performance optimization.
The engineer will also serve as a senior escalation point for complex F5 and network related production issues, performing root cause analysis and independently driving issues through resolution. The position requires someone who can evaluate existing F5 configurations, identify opportunities for improvement, recommend technical changes, and successfully implement those changes in production.
In addition to F5, the environment includes Palo Alto firewalls, Cisco networking, Terraform automation, and AWS cloud networking technologies. Experience with these technologies is valuable, but the strongest candidates will distinguish themselves through their depth of F5 LTM and GTM/DNS experience.
The role will also contribute to Infrastructure as Code and automation initiatives, particularly using Terraform to manage and deploy F5 configurations. As a senior member of the team, the engineer will provide technical guidance to other engineers, document changes and implementation procedures, and contribute to the continued modernization of the network security perimeter.
Some complex production changes may be scheduled during after hours maintenance windows.

our future duties and responsibilities
. Serve as a senior F5 BIG IP subject matter expert, with primary responsibility for F5 LTM and GTM/DNS engineering.
. Manage and support complex enterprise F5 LTM configurations, including virtual servers, pools, nodes, monitors, profiles, persistence, SSL/TLS, traffic management, and high availability.
. Support F5 GTM/DNS, including global traffic management, DNS based application availability, traffic distribution, and failover.
. Troubleshoot complex F5 production issues involving application traffic, load balancing, DNS, connectivity, SSL/TLS, performance, and availability.
. Perform root cause analysis for difficult F5 and network incidents and serve as an L3 escalation point for engineering related issues.
. Support F5 infrastructure modernization, including hardware replacements, platform migrations, configuration migrations, upgrades, and lifecycle management.
. Evaluate and implement F5 patches, software upgrades, security updates, and configuration hardening requirements.
. Support both physical and virtual F5 BIG IP environments and help optimize the existing F5 infrastructure footprint.
. Review existing F5 implementations and recommend improvements related to resiliency, performance, security, capacity, and operational efficiency.
. Use Terraform and Infrastructure as Code practices to automate F5 configuration, deployment, and provisioning where appropriate.
. Support Palo Alto firewall policy management and advanced firewall troubleshooting.
. Troubleshoot Cisco routing, switching, and network connectivity issues that affect F5 and application traffic.
. Support F5 and network services within hybrid and AWS heavy cloud environments, including exposure to AWS CloudFront and related networking and security services.
. Create implementation plans, change documentation, troubleshooting procedures, and technical standards.
. Provide technical leadership and mentoring to other network engineers.
. Support scheduled after hours implementation windows for complex or business critical F5 changes when required.


Required qualifications to be successful in this role
. 5+ years of F5 BIG IP experience
. Deep, recent hands on experience with F5 LTM (Local Traffic Manager) in large enterprise production environments.
. Deep, recent hands on experience with F5 GTM/DNS (Global Traffic Manager).
. Strong understanding of load balancing, application traffic management, DNS, high availability, failover, and traffic distribution.
. Hands on experience configuring and troubleshooting F5 virtual servers, pools, nodes, health monitors, profiles, persistence, SSL/TLS, and related BIG IP functionality.
. Experience supporting complex physical and virtual F5 BIG IP deployments.
. Experience performing F5 migrations, hardware/platform replacements, configuration migrations, upgrades, patching, and lifecycle management.
. Strong F5 troubleshooting skills with demonstrated experience resolving complex production issues independently.
. Experience with F5 performance, capacity, resiliency, security hardening, and infrastructure optimization.
. Ability to analyze existing F5 implementations and recommend practical improvements.
. Experience working with F5 in highly available, business critical enterprise environments.
. Experience with Palo Alto firewalls, particularly policy management and complex troubleshooting.
. Intermediate Cisco routing and switching knowledge.
. Strong TCP/IP, routing, switching, DNS, SSL/TLS, firewall, and network troubleshooting fundamentals.
. Experience serving as a senior/L3 escalation point for complex infrastructure issues.
. Strong root cause analysis and problem solving capabilities.
. Ability to lead technical implementations and provide guidance to other engineers.
. Strong technical documentation and communication skills.

Desired Skillset:

. Terraform experience, particularly automating F5 or network infrastructure configuration.
. Infrastructure as Code and automated provisioning experience.
. AWS networking experience, including familiarity with AWS CloudFront and cloud network/security services.
. Experience supporting hybrid data center and AWS environments.
. Ansible or Ansible Automation Platform experience.
. F5 ASM/WAF experience.
. Additional Palo Alto firewall experience.
. Azure or Google Cloud Platform network, firewall, or load balancing experience.
. ServiceNow and/or Jira experience.
. F5, Palo Alto, Cisco, AWS, or Terraform certifications are a plus.

Education:
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Technology, Network Engineering, or a related technical field.?
Why Join Us?
You will have the opportunity to work on high-impact cloud data initiatives supporting enterprise risk and analytics with one of world class fortune 500 companies. This role offers exposure to modern AWS technologies, complex data challenges, AI-enabled automation, and cross-functional collaboration within a major financial services environment.
Apply Today