Responsibilities: Design, configure, and manage F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) virtual servers, pools, nodes, and monitors for enterprise applications across multiple environments (Development, QA, Staging, Production). Networking: TCP/IP, HTTP/HTTPS, DNS, SSL/TLS, VLAN, SNAT, routing protocols (BGP, OSPF), and packet-level troubleshooting (tcpdump, Wireshark).
Numbers & Facts
Location
Hartford, CT
Description
Our client, a IT Services and Consulting company, is looking for a F5 Network Engineer for their Hartford, CT/Hybrid location.
Responsibilities:
Design, configure, and manage F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) virtual servers, pools, nodes, and monitors for enterprise applications across multiple environments (Development, QA, Staging, Production).
Develop and maintain iRules, iApps, and Local Traffic Policies to enable advanced traffic steering, header manipulation, URI-based routing, SSL offloading, and content switching.
Implement and manage F5 BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager (GTM / DNS) for geographic load balancing, disaster recovery failover, and multi-data-center traffic distribution.
Configure and troubleshoot SSL/TLS termination, certificate management, and end-to-end encryption across the F5 platform, including integration with enterprise PKI and certificate authorities.
Build and maintain health monitors (HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, UDP, custom scripted) to ensure proactive detection of application and service degradation.
Support application development teams by integrating load balancing configurations into CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) workflows using Ansible, Terraform, or F5 AS3/DO declarative APIs.
Perform capacity planning, traffic analysis, and performance tuning of F5 appliances and virtual editions (VE) to meet SLA and throughput requirements.
Troubleshoot complex application delivery issues spanning L4-L7 layers, including packet captures, SSL handshake failures, persistence problems, and asymmetric routing.
Manage F5 Advanced WAF (Web Application Firewall) policies to protect applications against OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, bot traffic, and DDoS attacks.
Collaborate with network, security, and application teams to architect resilient, scalable load balancing solutions aligned with enterprise standards.
Maintain documentation including topology diagrams, runbooks, change records, and standard operating procedures for all F5 and load balancing configurations.
Participate in on-call rotations and provide L3 support for production incidents involving application delivery and traffic management.
Scripting & Automation: iRules (TCL-based), iApps, F5 AS3, DO (Declarative Onboarding), TS (Telemetry Streaming), and REST API integration.
Application Development: Server-side and application-tier development (Java, Python, Node.js, or .NET) with understanding of how applications interact with load balancers and reverse proxies.
Cloud Platforms: Experience with F5 VE deployments on AWS (ELB/ALB/NLB integration), Azure (Application Gateway), or GCP; understanding of cloud-native load balancing services.
CI/CD & IaC: Ansible playbooks for F5, Terraform F5 provider, Jenkins/GitLab CI integration for automated deployments.
Monitoring & Observability: Splunk, ELK, Grafana, or F5 Analytics/AVR for traffic visibility, dashboarding, and alerting.
Security: WAF policy tuning, DDoS mitigation, bot management, zero-trust principles, and security hardening of application delivery infrastructure.