Role Summary
The Network Data Engineer - L3 Load Balancer is a senior technical SME responsible for advanced administration, troubleshooting, design validation, optimization and governance of enterprise load balancing and application delivery services. The role owns escalated and major load balancer incidents, complex changes, RCA leadership, application traffic analysis, SSL/TLS and certificate management support, standards/templates, service improvement and mentoring of L1/L2 teams. The engineer works closely with application, security, cloud, network, data center, service management, and OEM teams to maintain high availability and performance of business-critical applications.
Key Roles & Responsibilities
- Advanced Load Balancer Escalation: Act as L3 escalation point for complex load balancer incidents involving VIP availability, pool/member health, persistence, SSL handshake, application response, GTM/DNS behavior, health monitors, routing, NAT/SNAT and asymmetric traffic issues.
- F5 LTM/GTM Administration: Provide expert support for F5 BIG-IP LTM and GTM/DNS administration, including virtual servers, pools, nodes, monitors, profiles, data centers, wide IPs, topology records and traffic policies.
- Application Delivery Troubleshooting: Analyze application-specific traffic flows using logs, packet captures, connection tables, browser/application symptoms and backend server behavior to isolate network, load balancer, SSL or application-layer causes.
- SSL/TLS & Certificate Governance: Support SSL termination, SSL cipher/certificate management, certificate renewal tracking, expiry reporting, client/server SSL profiles and coordination with application/security teams for certificate lifecycle changes.
- iRules & Traffic Policies: Develop, review and troubleshoot F5 iRules and traffic policies for HTTP header/payload rewrite, redirects, routing decisions, persistence logic and application-specific requirements.
- Complex Change Ownership: Plan, peer-review and/or execute complex load balancer changes, including VIP/pool/node/profile updates, SSL profile changes, GTM changes, application cutovers, firmware upgrades, hardware refreshes and migration events.
- WAF / ASM / APM Adjacent Support: Provide operational support and technical coordination for F5 ASM/WAF, Silverline/Akamai WAF and APM capabilities where in scope, including policy impact analysis and escalation support.
- Major Incident & RCA Leadership: Lead technical analysis for major incidents, produce RCA inputs, identify corrective/preventive actions, coordinate OEM TAC and application/security teams, and drive permanent remediation.
- Standards, Templates & Documentation: Maintain load balancer standards, configuration templates, MOPs, rollback plans, operational runbooks, VIP/pool inventory, certificate registers and knowledge articles.
- Automation & Continuous Improvement: Identify automation use cases for backups, certificate checks, VIP/pool audits, health checks, configuration drift, application cutover validation and repetitive operational tasks.
Day-to-Day / Weekly Activities
- Own escalated load balancer incidents and provide technical direction on major incident bridges.
- Review L2 escalations, validate logs/configuration/health evidence and determine restoration or workaround actions.
- Analyze VIP, pool, node, monitor, SSL profile, iRule, GTM/DNS, routing, NAT/SNAT and backend application symptoms.
- Plan, peer-review and support complex load balancer changes, application cutovers, certificate renewals, firmware upgrades and migrations.
- Drive OEM TAC cases with configuration snapshots, qkview/tech-support outputs, logs, packet captures and business impact evidence.
- Maintain load balancer standards, golden templates, MOP/rollback plans, certificate registers, VIP inventory and runbooks.
- Mentor L1/L2 teams through technical sessions, case reviews, escalation quality checks and shift-left content.
- Participate in service reviews, problem reviews, CAB/change discussions, risk assessments, capacity reviews and continual improvement forums.
Experience, Qualifications & Certifications
- 8-10+ years of enterprise network engineering/operations experience, including senior support for load balancers, application delivery and complex enterprise application traffic flows.
- Bachelor degree/diploma in Computer Science, Electronics, IT, Telecommunications or equivalent practical network engineering experience.
- F5 Certified Administrator preferred; F5 Technology Specialist or higher certifications are an advantage.
- CCNP/CCIE, ITIL Foundation and cloud/network security certifications are preferred depending on account requirements.
- Preferred exposure: F5 BIG-IP LTM/GTM, iRules, SSL/TLS, ASM/WAF, APM, Viprion, Palo Alto/Fortinet coordination, Cisco Nexus, AWS/Azure load balancers, Python/TCL/API automation and ServiceNow.
