Lead Principal Application Software Engineer

Oracle•United States,

About The Position

The Lead Principal Application Software Engineer leads application software design, development, modernization, reliability, and maintenance initiatives across multiple teams. The role drives execution and improvement of the software development lifecycle, makes significant architectural decisions, establishes standards and reusable patterns, and provides expert technical guidance to engineers, stakeholders, and customers. It also leads work on APIs, application integrations, testing, observability, security, production readiness, and resolution of complex, systemic issues. The engineer partners with Product, Design, security, business leaders, customers, and external stakeholders to align technical strategy with customer and organizational goals. The role mentors engineers, including Staff engineers, and contributes to talent development, planning, continuous improvement, and industry knowledge sharing. Minimum qualifications provide several alternative combinations of education and software-development experience, ranging from 15 years of experience without a listed degree to a relevant doctorate and 7 years of experience. The role also requires 10 years of programming and/or scripting experience and 6 years of database experience. Preferred qualifications include additional software-development experience, Oracle product knowledge, technical-lead experience, budget or project-financial experience, and cloud-platform experience.

Requirements

At least 15 years of software-development experience; alternatively, a relevant B.Tech or bachelor's degree and 11 years of software-development experience, a relevant M.Tech or master's degree and 9 years, or a relevant doctorate and 7 years.
10 years of experience with programming and/or scripting languages, such as SQL, C/C++, or JavaScript.
6 years of experience with databases.
Relevant degrees are in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Electrical/Electronics Engineering, Computer Information Systems, Information Systems, Information Technology, Telecommunications, Mathematics, Physics, or a related field.

Nice To Haves

Preferred software-development experience: 16 years without a degree; alternatively, a relevant B.Tech or bachelor's degree and 12 years, a relevant M.Tech or master's degree and 10 years, or a relevant doctorate and 8 years.
Demonstrated knowledge of Oracle products and the ability to educate customers on their effective use.
2 years of experience in a technical lead role, with or without direct reports.
3 years of experience working with operating budgets and/or project financials.
5 years of experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, Google, or Oracle Cloud.

Responsibilities

Architect and deliver multi-team features and modernization initiatives with organization-level KPIs.
Establish production-readiness standards, including SLOs, error budgets, and incident tooling, and drive their adoption.
Diagnose and resolve high-severity, multi-system failures and create systemic reliability improvements across applications and OCI.
Harmonize QA strategies across teams, including test pyramids and non-functional testing.
Make significant architectural decisions; lead migrations and adoption of patterns, including deprecation plans.
Create scalable blueprints and reference implementations for adoption by multiple teams.
Define cross-team API governance and dependency-management frameworks, including API versioning, lifecycle, and interoperability strategies.
Use customer, field, telemetry, and live-site data to shape prioritization across teams; institutionalize feedback loops and measure impact.
Partner with Product and Design to balance customer value and technical strategy; mentor Staff engineers.
Lead software solution design, requirements analysis, foundational coding, and project initiatives for software, systems, and services.
Improve software development lifecycle execution and coach engineers across teams.
Guide new software features and enhancements to meet design specifications and accessibility expectations; document software design and code.
Lead process, architecture, and code reviews, and ensure adherence to architectural standards and acceptance criteria.
Lead testing, quality assurance, error logging, monitoring, observability, debugging, and performance-optimization initiatives.
Research and evaluate technologies and industry practices, translating findings into architectural decisions and plans.
Resolve complex software and API issues, integrations, and service-to-service interactions.
Define project and design scope and review, influence, and approve scope and design recommendations.
Provide architectural guidance, domain expertise, and coaching to teams and peers; align architecture with business and customer goals.
Collaborate with stakeholders to investigate customer issues, identify root causes and mitigations, explain solutions, and provide expert technical support to prevent recurrence.
Advocate for customer interests, recommend product enhancements, coordinate issue resolution, and guide customer issue and defect handling processes.
Work with security and leadership teams to establish and improve development practices and coding standards; coach less experienced team members.
Implement secure software development practices and solutions, using automation to augment manual security review and prevent vulnerabilities.
Lead periodic system maintenance, testing, upgrades, and patching, including for critical vulnerabilities; improve automation, availability, health, support, and reliability.
Direct timelines, deliverables, and budgets where applicable for critical projects, and anticipate resource or schedule changes as priorities shift.
Influence cross-functional leaders and external stakeholders, build partnerships, and incorporate diverse perspectives.
Lead advanced problem-solving and escalations; guide data-driven root-cause analysis and solutions that prevent recurrence.
Promote continuous learning, knowledge sharing, professional development, and industry thought leadership.
Develop, implement, and measure improvements to organizational processes, protocols, and workflows.
Contribute expert knowledge to talent strategy, interviews, candidate assessments, and hiring decisions.