Lead Principal Application Software Engineer

Oracle•United States,

6d•$104,600 - $264,100

About The Position

The Lead Principal Application Software Engineer is an organizational subject matter expert who leads application software design, development, architecture, quality, reliability, security, and maintenance initiatives. The role drives multi-team features and modernization programs, makes significant architectural decisions, establishes production-readiness and API governance practices, and creates scalable blueprints adopted across teams. It also guides the software development lifecycle, testing, observability, performance, and secure coding practices while coaching engineers and mentoring Staff engineers. The position partners with Product, Design, customers, internal stakeholders, security and leadership teams to align technical strategy with customer and business goals. It leads investigation and resolution of complex, high-impact application and customer issues, sets approaches for preventing recurrence, and provides expert technical guidance. The role also contributes to planning and execution of critical initiatives, organizational continuous improvement, talent development, and knowledge sharing.

Requirements

Expertise in application software development, software architecture, and the software development lifecycle.
Experience leading multi-team software features, modernization initiatives, and high-impact technical projects.
Ability to make and guide significant architectural decisions, lead migrations, and establish scalable design patterns and reference implementations.
Expertise in API functionality, integration, service-to-service interactions, governance, versioning, lifecycle, and interoperability.
Ability to diagnose and resolve highly complex software defects, systemic issues, and high-severity multi-system failures.
Knowledge of software testing, quality assurance, monitoring, observability, error logging, reliability, and performance optimization.
Knowledge of secure software development practices, coding standards, and approaches to preventing security vulnerabilities.
Ability to collaborate with customers and internal and external stakeholders to identify use cases, root causes, mitigations, and product improvements.
Ability to lead project planning and execution, including timelines, deliverables, and budgets when applicable.
Ability to coach and mentor engineers, influence cross-functional stakeholders, and drive organizational improvements.
Deep industry knowledge and commitment to tracking emerging technologies, trends, and standards.

Responsibilities

Architect and deliver multi-team features and modernization initiatives, establishing clear organization-level KPIs.
Establish production-readiness standards, including service-level objectives, error budgets, and incident tooling, and drive their adoption.
Diagnose and resolve high-severity, multi-system failures and implement systemic reliability improvements across applications and OCI.
Harmonize quality assurance strategies across teams, including test pyramids and non-functional testing.
Make significant architectural decisions; lead migrations and adoption of patterns with 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.
Shape prioritization across teams using customer and field feedback, telemetry, and live-site signals; institutionalize feedback loops and measure their impact.
Mentor Staff engineers and partner with Product and Design to balance customer value and technical strategy.
Lead software solution design, requirements analysis, and foundational coding for new projects or prototypes.
Improve execution of the software development lifecycle and coach engineers across teams or organizational units.
Guide development of features and enhancements according to design specifications, ensuring accessibility and documenting software design and code.
Lead process, architecture, and code reviews across projects and products or services.
Use modern and emerging technologies to debug and resolve highly complex software issues, API problems, and integration issues.
Optimize testing, quality assurance, error logging, monitoring, observability, and performance across products and domains.
Lead design and development of software, systems, and services; define project scope and review, influence, and approve scope and design recommendations.
Provide technical guidance and coaching on software architecture and best practices; conduct complex reviews for architectural standards and make decisions informed by technology research and evaluation.
Collaborate with internal and external stakeholders to align software architecture and solutions with business and customer goals.
Investigate customer issues, determine root causes and mitigations, explain solution rationale, and provide technical guidance to prevent recurrence.
Advocate for customers, recommend product enhancements based on feedback, coordinate issue resolution and communication, and guide strategic issue-handling and training processes.
Collaborate with security and leadership teams to establish and improve development practices, coding standards, and code quality; coach less experienced team members.
Lead quality and acceptance-criteria initiatives, apply industry best practices, and implement secure development practices using automated solutions to help prevent vulnerabilities.
Lead periodic maintenance, testing, upgrades, and patching of systems, including for critical vulnerabilities; improve automation, testing, debugging, availability, health, support, and reliability.
Direct timelines, deliverables, and budgets when applicable for critical, high-impact projects; anticipate changes in resources or timelines as priorities shift.
Influence cross-functional leaders and external stakeholders, build partnerships, and incorporate diverse perspectives.
Serve as an escalation point for complex problems; guide data-driven root-cause analysis and solutions that prevent recurrence.
Monitor emerging trends, technologies, and standards; contribute thought leadership and promote continuous learning and knowledge sharing.
Develop and implement process improvements, evaluate their effectiveness, and design metrics to measure success.
Support talent strategy and development, including interviews, candidate assessments, and hiring decisions.