Lead Architect – Application Security

Senior Architect For Application Security

F5 is seeking a Senior Architect for Application Security to lead technical strategy and architecture across its entire security portfolio, including WAF, DDoS mitigation, AI Security, Bot Defense, API Security, TLS inspection, and identity-aware access. This role drives the evolution of F5's security services across SaaS, hardware, and cloud-native platforms, ensuring they are integrated, scalable, and secure-by-design. As a senior technical leader, you will unify architectural direction, modernize legacy systems, and represent F5's security vision in both internal strategy and external engagements.

Responsibilities include:

• Defining the cross-portfolio application security architecture strategy, covering hardware, software, and cloud-native solutions, and aligning it to F5's long-term business and technology vision.
• Establishing architectural principles, patterns, and roadmaps that guide how WAF, WAAP, API security, DDoS, identity, client-side protection, AI/ML-powered detection and response, and related capabilities are designed, integrated, and delivered.
• Leading architectural modernization efforts to evolve monolithic or appliance-based capabilities into composable, API-driven services within a SaaS-native security control plane.
• Influencing the security posture and innovation roadmap across F5 Distributed Cloud Services, BIG-IP, NGINX, and future platform initiatives.
• Championing architectural governance and threat modeling across teams to ensure scalability, observability, resiliency, and secure-by-default practices are institutionalized.
• Driving cross-functional alignment across product, engineering, SRE, and infrastructure teams to ensure seamless and secure user experiences across hybrid, multicloud, and edge deployments.
• Mentoring a community of senior architects and engineers, raising the bar for application security talent across the company.
• Representing F5's technical vision in customer briefings, industry forums, regulatory discussions, and analyst engagements, serving as a technical ambassador for application security innovation.

Skills and qualifications include:

• 20+ years of experience in software and security architecture roles, with at least 10 years focused specifically on application-layer security.
• Proven track record architecting complex security systems in domains such as WAAP, API security, DDoS mitigation, bot protection, and malware detection.
• Deep understanding of L7 protocols (HTTP/2, HTTP/3, Web Sockets, gRPC) and application security standards (OWASP Top 10, NIST, MITRE ATT&CK).
• Strong technical understanding of TLS, certificate management, identity and access protocols (OAuth2, OIDC, SAML), and secure session management.
• Familiarity with zero trust architectures, policy-as-code, multi-tenant SaaS designs, and runtime enforcement in container-based platforms (Kubernetes, Istio, Envoy).
• Demonstrated ability to set architectural strategy across product boundaries and influence senior engineering and product leadership.
• Experience designing and implementing distributed cloud solutions at scale.
• Understanding of containers and orchestration technologies.
• Broad understanding of coding and programming languages.
• Extensive knowledge of the software development process and corresponding technologies.
• Excellent understanding of design patterns and architectural styles.
• Proficient knowledge of the operation and development designs of agile software.

Strong soft skills, including attention to detail, problem-solving and communication skills.