J. Galloway

Network Security Engineer · F5 BIG-IP

I design, secure and run F5 BIG-IP platforms in large enterprise and financial environments, and have for more than ten years.

Most of my work is load balancing, global DNS, remote access and application security: planning the architecture, migrating hardware, tuning WAF policy and being the person who gets called when traffic stops flowing. I also support Palo Alto firewalls through Panorama. Day to day, BIG-IP operations run on automation rather than hand-typed changes, from onboarding a new device to deploying a new application in a few minutes.

I take an AI-first approach to the engineering work: AI tools help write automation, modernize iRules and plan migrations, and every change still goes through peer review and non-production testing before it ships.

Focus

Platforms
F5OS-A on rSeries, tenants and BIG-IP VE. Led the migration of end-of-life iSeries HA pairs to rSeries, from design through decommissioning
Automation
Fully automated daily BIG-IP tasks, upgrades and deployments with Ansible, Ansible Automation Platform and Semaphore, Declarative Onboarding, AS3 and FAST templates, kept in Git and integrated with BlueCat for DNS and Keyfactor for SSL certificate lifecycle
AI-assisted engineering
Claude Code and Codex for automation and iRule work, Glean for daily operational briefings and outage summaries
Application security
Advanced WAF policy with bot defense, DDoS mitigation, TLS hardening and cipher policy
Firewall
Palo Alto Networks NGFW and PAN-OS, with policy deployed through Panorama device groups and templates
Access Policy Manager
SSL VPN, OAuth, SAML and Kerberos single sign-on, certificate-based authentication
Traffic & DNS
LTM, BIG-IP DNS (GTM) and iRules, including modernizing older iRules into native LTM policies
Operations
BIG-IQ application self-service, Application Study Tool, Telemetry Streaming and Grafana dashboards, and vulnerability response across the fleet

Background