Sr Engineer - Data Scientist - API Security

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.

We are seeking a Senior Data Scientist / Software Engineer to help design and develop algorithms and systems for our industry-leading API Security product, which protects customers from API-based attacks. In this role, you will take ownership of security-related features and detection systems end-to-end — applying advanced data science techniques, analyzing large-scale datasets, and delivering actionable insights. The ideal candidate will have deep API Security knowledge, strong data science expertise, and the versatility to build robust, scalable end-to-end solutions independently in a SaaS environment.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Own the full lifecycle of security detection features, including data research, design, development, testing, and deployment of threat detection systems.
• Build and optimize algorithms to detect API-specific attacks (e.g., OWASP API Top 10) based on behavioral analysis, anomaly detection, and large-scale data analysis.
• Perform extensive data research to identify new attack patterns, vulnerabilities, or anomalies and translate findings into actionable, automated detection logic.
• Collaborate with global engineering, product management, and SRE teams to develop scalable and secure solutions for detecting and responding to API threats.
• Maintain data pipelines, models, and algorithms in containerized architectures updated with the latest packages and aligned with SRE guidelines.
• Troubleshoot data-driven issues in complex, multi-service architectures and collaborate across teams to resolve them.

Job Requirements:

• Data Science Expertise: Strong knowledge of data science techniques applied to security, such as hh, and statistical analysis.
• Programming Proficiency: Expertise in at least two programming languages (e.g., Python, Go, Scala, Rust), with advanced skills in Python preferred for data science tasks.
• Data Analysis and Research: Experience with large-scale datasets, developing detection algorithms, and translating insights into productized solutions.
• SaaS and Cloud Environments: Proficient in building secure SaaS applications, containerized environments (Docker/Kubernetes), and managing CI/CD pipelines.
• Collaboration and Communication: Strong interpersonal and analytical skills to collaborate with cross-functional teams and explain technical findings clearly.

Significant Advantage:

• API Security Expertise: Strong knowledge of the API Security domain, threat detection techniques, and experience in data research. (strong advantage)
• Data Technologies: Spark Databases, Databricks, Kafka, SQL, Pandas Dataframes, etc.

Qualifications:

• Minimum of 6 years of experience combining software engineering and data science work, with expertise in API Security and the development of detection systems.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

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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.

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.