Prompt Engineer

Role Summary: Prompt Engineer at F5

F5 is actively seeking a creative, analytical, and detail-oriented Prompt Engineer to join its innovative engineering team. In this pivotal role, you will be responsible for designing, developing, testing, and optimizing prompts that ensure secure and effective interactions with Large Language Models (LLMs) and emerging agentic AI systems. This position is central to F5's AI development strategy, with direct contributions to our AI-powered platforms through enhanced security testing, robust adversarial challenge resolution, and driving innovation in natural language processing.

Your contributions will be vital in ensuring the robustness, reliability, and safety of F5's AI solutions, thereby enabling customers to confidently adopt AI and other advanced technologies while navigating the complexities of modern AI security landscapes.

Key Responsibilities

Prompt Design and Optimization

• Develop, refine, and iterate on high-performing prompts for Large Language Models (LLMs) to achieve specific goals, such as security testing, red-teaming exercises (e.g., simulating prompt injection, jailbreaking, or data elicitation), or validating AI defensive measures.
• Experiment with and implement advanced prompting methodologies, including few-shot prompting, chain-of-thought prompting, role-playing, and structured prompts to maximize AI interaction efficiency and effectiveness.
• Identify failure modes, unexpected outputs, or vulnerabilities in LLM behavior and address these through systematic prompt refinement and optimization.

Collaboration and Integration

• Work closely with AI Researchers and Engineering teams to integrate effective prompts into F5's AI security platforms and other advanced ML-based systems.
• Assist in the design and implementation of supportive tools, workflows, and processes that enhance prompt engineering capabilities.
• Build and maintain a comprehensive internal library of effective prompting strategies, techniques, and best practices, fostering knowledge sharing across teams.

Research and Development

• Stay informed about cutting-edge developments in LLMs, prompt engineering strategies, and AI security advancements, applying these learnings to improve system performance.
• Participate in testing and evaluating the security implications and effectiveness of new prompting strategies across various AI systems and use cases.
• Contribute to internal knowledge bases by documenting successful strategies, experimental results, and key insights.

Required Qualifications

• Educational Background: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Human-Computer Interaction, or a related field; or equivalent practical experience in prompt engineering and LLM optimization.
• Technical and Analytical Expertise: Proven hands-on experience in prompt design and refinement for large language models (e.g., GPT series, Claude, Llama, etc.). Strong understanding of LLM capabilities, limitations, common failure modes, and alignment strategies. Familiarity with prompt engineering techniques including few-shot prompting, structured designs, and context injection.
• Problem-Solving and Communication Skills: Excellent analytical and critical-thinking skills with meticulous attention to detail when troubleshooting complex LLM behaviors. Strong verbal and written communication skills, capable of translating technical outputs into actionable insights for diverse audiences.
• Passion for AI and NLP: Strong interest and understanding of Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and AI-driven security concepts and mechanisms.

Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrable experience in applying prompt engineering specifically for AI security, red-teaming, or vulnerability assessment purposes.
• Background in working with or developing frameworks for agentic AI systems (e.g., LangChain, Auto-GPT).
• Proficiency in basic scripting for automation (e.g., using Python) to streamline prompt testing or analysis.
• Familiarity with evaluation techniques for LLM performance and safety, such as detecting adversarial weaknesses or other failure modes.
• Experience working with APIs for major LLM providers.
• Ability to showcase creative and effective prompt engineering in a portfolio of examples.
• Understanding of adversarial attacks against NLP models, such as prompt injection or poisoning attacks, and mitigation strategies.

What Success Looks Like

• Delivering high-quality prompts that improve the effectiveness, reliability, and security of AI systems in production environments.
• Collaborating effectively with cross-functional teams to integrate innovative prompt engineering strategies into F5’s AI platforms.
• Staying ahead of industry trends and emerging developments in the LLM landscape by applying cutting-edge methodologies to projects at F5.
• Building a culture of innovation and collaboration by sharing knowledge, strategies, and new approaches with internal teams.

Why Join F5?

At F5, we are driven by the mission to empower our customers with secure and scalable solutions in an increasingly AI-powered world. Joining our Prompt Engineering team means you’ll have the opportunity to:

• Influence the direction of cutting-edge AI initiatives and tools that tackle real-world security challenges.
• Work in a collaborative, inclusive, and innovation-driven environment that values diversity of thought and expertise.
• Gain access to resources, mentorship, and opportunities to advance your knowledge and career in AI, LLMs, and NLP.

Key skills/competency

• Prompt Engineering
• Large Language Models (LLMs)
• AI Security
• Red-Teaming
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Python Scripting
• Adversarial AI
• LLM Optimization
• Structured Prompting
• Data Elicitation