Senior Security Engineer, AI & Automation

About F5

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.

Role Overview

The Senior Security Engineer, AI & Automation is responsible for designing, reviewing, and operating production-grade automation and AI capabilities that improve the effectiveness, scalability, and reliability of Security Operations. As part of the Security Operations Platform Engineering (SOPE) team, this role develops the platforms, integrations, workflows, and agentic systems that enable Incident Response, Threat Intelligence, Detection Engineering, and Threat Hunting teams to operate more efficiently. The ideal candidate combines strong software and automation engineering fundamentals with practical AI experience and the judgment required to safely deploy systems that influence security operations at scale. This role serves as a senior technical contributor responsible for establishing trusted, maintainable, and secure automation capabilities that other security functions depend upon.

Primary Responsibilities

• Design and develop production-grade automation and AI capabilities that reduce operational toil, improve security outcomes, and scale security operations workflows across the organization.
• Review and approve CI/CD pipelines, automation workflows, integrations, and AI-enabled systems that interact with production security platforms, incident management processes, and operational data.
• Build and maintain API-driven integrations across security technologies, cloud services, AI platforms, and operational tooling while ensuring reliability, security, and observability.
• Lead implementation of agentic and AI-assisted workflows that support investigation, enrichment, correlation, triage, and response activities while maintaining appropriate guardrails, auditability, and human oversight.
• Establish and promote engineering standards for automation development, testing, code review, change management, operational safety, and platform reliability.
• Partner with Incident Response, Detection Engineering, Threat Intelligence, Threat Hunting, and platform engineering teams to identify high-value use cases and deliver scalable automation and AI solutions.
• Evaluate and recommend AI, automation, and orchestration technologies by balancing innovation, risk, maintainability, operational impact, and long-term ownership.

Additional Notes

This role is focused on platform engineering, automation, and AI enablement, not SOC operations or detection authoring. Experience as a SOC analyst is not required. Success in this role requires strong system design skills, production engineering judgment, and the ability to review and safely operate automation and AI systems that directly impact security operations workflows and security platforms.

What Success Looks Like

• Delivers trusted automation and AI capabilities that are safe, reliable, auditable, and maintainable in production environments.
• Raises engineering quality through thoughtful code reviews, architecture reviews, pipeline governance, and automation standards.
• Improves operational efficiency by automating repetitive workflows and enabling security teams to focus on higher-value investigative work.
• Enables SOPE and partner teams to build on shared automation and AI platforms rather than creating isolated point solutions.
• Advances AI adoption through measurable operational improvements while maintaining strong controls, transparency, and trust in automated decision-making.

Work Environment

This is a full-time engineering role and is not a shift-based position. Participation in an engineering on-call rotation is required and may occasionally require support outside normal business hours during critical incidents, platform outages, or significant operational events. The Senior Security Engineer may be engaged as a subject matter expert during security incidents but is not responsible for primary SOC operations or incident response functions.

Required Skills / Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, security engineering, automation engineering, or related technical disciplines.
• Advanced proficiency in Python and GitLab CI/CD, including the ability to review, troubleshoot, and approve production automation pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and deployment workflows.
• Demonstrated experience building and supporting API-driven integrations utilizing REST APIs, OAuth/token-based authentication, pagination, rate limiting, error handling, and service-to-service communications.
• Experience designing, developing, or operating AI-assisted, agentic, or LLM-powered solutions with a demonstrated ability to validate outputs, identify failure modes, and implement appropriate safeguards.
• Strong written communication skills with experience producing design documents, architecture decision records (ADRs), implementation plans, technical reviews, and collaborating effectively in asynchronous, distributed environments.

Preferred Skills / Qualifications

• Experience developing AI agents and workflows using Vertex AI, Agent Development Kit (ADK), LangGraph, LangChain, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, CrewAI, or similar frameworks.
• Experience with Tines, SOAR platforms, workflow orchestration systems, or large-scale security automation programs.
• Experience supporting Detection-as-Code, CI/CD-driven security content pipelines, or detection engineering programs.
• Experience implementing secure credential management, least-privilege architectures, secrets management, and production-grade security controls.
• Experience integrating security operations platforms such as CrowdStrike, ServiceNow, cloud security services, SIEM platforms, or related enterprise security technologies.