Senior Architect, Application Security & Cloud Defense

F5; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 298,000 - 446,000; Full time

Job summary

F5 is seeking a Senior Architect for Application Security to lead the strategy and architecture across its security portfolio, including WAAP, DDoS mitigation, AI Security, Bot Defense, API Security, TLS inspection, and identity-aware access. This role drives evolution across SaaS, hardware, and cloud-native platforms, ensuring integration, scalability, and secure-by-design.

As a senior technical leader, you will unify architectural direction, modernize legacy systems, and represent F5’s

Qualifications

• 20+ years of experience in software and security architecture roles, with focus on application security.
• Proven track record architecting complex security systems in WAAP, API security, and DDoS mitigation.
• Deep understanding of TLS, certificates, and identity protocols (OAuth2, OIDC, SAML).

Responsibilities

• Define cross-portfolio application security architecture strategy for hardware, software, and cloud-native solutions.
• Establish principles and roadmaps for WAAP, API security, DDoS, identity and bot protection.
• Lead modernization to API-driven services within a SaaS-native security control plane.
• Influence security posture across F5 Distributed Cloud Services, BIG-IP, NGINX, and future platforms.
• Champion governance, threat modeling, and secure-by-default practices across teams.
• Drive alignment across product, engineering, SRE, and infrastructure for secure user experiences across multi-cloud and edge deployments.
• Mentor senior architects and engineers to raise security talent levels.
• Represent F5’s security vision in customer briefings, industry forums, and analyst engagements.

Skills

Security architecture

Application security

WAAP/API security

DDoS mitigation

Bot protection

TLS / PKI

OAuth2 / OIDC / SAML

Kubernetes / Istio / Envoy

Threat modeling

Distributed cloud

Tools

Kubernetes

Istio

Envoy

Nginx

TLS management

Job description

F5 is seeking a Senior Architect for Application Security to lead the strategy and architecture across its security portfolio, including WAAP, DDoS mitigation, AI Security, Bot Defense, API Security, TLS inspection, and identity-aware access. This role drives evolution across SaaS, hardware, and cloud-native platforms, ensuring integration, scalability, and secure-by-design.

As a senior technical leader, you will unify architectural direction, modernize legacy systems, and represent F5’s