Product Architect (Project Management)

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.

Product Architect

NGINX Architecture Team – Seattle, San Jose, Denver, Remote, USA & Canada

An architect within the NGINX architecture team is a senior engineer. Candidates have years of experience working at different layers of the software development stack and have experience with product design, go to market, software testing, and product management.

Architecture Team

Our mission is to enable the broader NGINX team to embody the software development competencies needed to bring industry defining software products to market. Architects balance social skills, technical prowess, generalist knowledge sets, and communication skills to make others more effective. This is a small team of practitioners who value deep technical proficiency, curiosity, joy, open-source software, and effective software development methodologies.

Projects

In this role, you will be analyzing source code, improving the product development processes, prototyping solutions that improve velocity, introducing the latest, and assisting the product management team in the art of the possible. Projects may span from an analysis of a communication protocol that works with a distributed system to analyzing the potential market for a new product. Moreover, some projects will be done in an advisory capacity where an architect lays out the groundwork and thinking and then engages the rest of the team to foster their own creative solutions.

Candidates

An ideal candidate will be a veteran programmer who has experience working with

performance-sensitive C projects involving networking. Candidates will have some amount of experience tracking down memory, locking, event loop blocking, and I/O contention problems in order to know what needs to be addressed or avoided when developing new designs. Essentially, candidates understand many of the real-world performance scenarios that happen when you run a program on hardware in the physical universe and not in a theoretical construct in your head.

A promising candidate should be able to know when to speed up, slow down, take risks, and be careful, almost instinctively. The ability to choose dangerous tinkering vs. methodical engineering and the ability to confidently defend the approach while establishing credibility is a must. As such, being able to communicate one's research findings with clarity and persuasiveness is a crucial component to success in this role.

Candidates have internalized the trade-offs with different approaches and can draw from historical examples and past personal experiences when designing new solutions.

Communication

A core skill of members of the Architecture team is the ability to not only model creative solutions but to transfer enthusiasm for the solutions to a broader community. In order to do this, one must be able to communicate effectively across a wide range of mediums.

Team members are expected to have a good degree of emotional maturity, an ability to read a room effectively and embrace other's differences. Although they may be aware of politics, they choose to be as earnest and sincere as possible. This sincerity is an important part of an architect's projection of enthusiasm into the larger organization and community.

A Typical Day

An architect's daily work will differ depending on the current phase of a project. At the onset of a new project, defining goals, architects will be actively engaged in researching the current state of art, writing design documents, and having discussions with other experts. As a project moves forward, work will shift to coaching team members on design. Finally, as a project nears completion, work may move towards coaching team members on performance testing, correctness verification, and housekeeping for knowledge transfer and/or open-source release. In short, the underpinning of all daily work is the craft of software engineering.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

The following is a summary of the abilities of an ideal candidate.

• Ability to work independently and creatively across both familiar and unfamiliar technologies and practice self-discipline in achieving results
• Strong background in programming using two or more statically typed languages
• Experience with programming in Rust or Zig or an eagerness to learn both
• Ability to write software applications in at least one dynamic language such as Python, Ruby, or JavaScript
• Strong understanding of networking concepts at L4-L7
• Experience using and programming for Un*x (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) operating systems
• Experience and interest with distributed systems problems
• Theoretical understanding of algorithms and data structures
• An open mind: having humility and willingness to understand personal gaps in knowledge and pragmatically fill them as appropriate
• Strong sense of teamwork and ability to leverage team knowledge
• Experience with open-source development and tools
• Experience serving as a mentor to other technical staff and providing team leadership
• Interpersonal and presentation skills with ability to articulate complex technology simply
• Strong writing skills, with an emphasis on communicating software architecture and design

#LI-JB1

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.

The annual base pay for this position is: $237,848.00 - $356,772.00

F5 maintains broad salary ranges for its roles in order to account for variations in knowledge, skills, experience, geographic locations, and market conditions, as well as to reflect F5's differing products, industries, and lines of business. The pay range referenced is as of the time of the job posting and is subject to change.

You may also be offered incentive compensation, bonus, restricted stock units, and benefits. More details about F5's benefits can be found at the following link: https://www.f5.com/company/careers/benefits. F5 reserves the right to change or terminate any benefit plan without notice. 

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.