Principal Architect

Oracle•Redwood City, CA

About The Position

Oracle is seeking a Principal Architect to improve product quality by strengthening testing processes and ensuring tests cover key customer use cases. The role bridges customer support, sustaining engineering, and quality engineering to understand how Oracle Database is deployed and used in production. The Principal Architect will use customer insights to set testing priorities and improve coverage of real-world workloads, helping improve reliability, scalability, availability, and performance. The position serves as a subject matter expert on enterprise Oracle Database deployments and operations. It establishes customer engagement mechanisms, analyzes telemetry and support trends, and translates customer deployment patterns into functional, stress, performance, and reliability testing. Testing strategies should better represent customer environments across on-premises, OCI, and hybrid deployments. The role also identifies ways to improve testing tools and processes while minimizing disruption to engineering teams, and defines meaningful quality metrics and dashboards.

Requirements

10–15 years of experience in software quality engineering, database engineering, software architecture, or related technical leadership roles.
Deep expertise with Oracle Database technologies and enterprise database deployments.
Strong understanding of Oracle Database customer environments, operational practices, and enterprise workloads.
Experience designing or leading functional, performance, scalability, stress, and reliability testing for enterprise software.
Ability to translate customer requirements into testing priorities.
Experience working across Development, QA, Sustaining Engineering, and customer-facing organizations.
Excellent communication and executive presentation skills.
Strong analytical skills, including the ability to identify trends from customer data, telemetry, and support feedback.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Oracle Database internals and enterprise features such as RAC, Data Guard, Multitenant, ASM, Exadata, GoldenGate, and OCI Database Services.
Experience analyzing customer telemetry, support data, benchmark workloads, or production performance trends.

Responsibilities

Become the subject matter expert on how customers deploy, operate, and scale Oracle Database across enterprise environments.
Establish customer advisory forums, internal working groups, and data-driven feedback channels to capture deployment patterns, operational pain points, and emerging workloads.
Analyze customer telemetry, support trends, benchmark workloads, and field feedback to identify testing gaps and opportunities.
Translate customer usage patterns into improved functional, stress, performance, and reliability testing.
Drive Oracle Database-specific testing strategies that reflect customer deployments across on-premises, OCI, and hybrid environments.
Build ongoing mechanisms to understand customer deployments, workloads, upgrade strategies, operational practices, and pain points at an architectural level.
Develop relationships across sustaining engineering and strategic customers.
Convert customer insights into actionable improvements in testing strategy and product quality.
Define testing priorities based on real Oracle Database customer workloads.
Improve functional, stress, performance, high-availability, upgrade, and scalability testing using production-inspired scenarios.
Ensure testing reflects Oracle-specific architectures, including RAC, Data Guard, Multitenant, Exadata, OCI, Autonomous Database integrations, and hybrid deployments where applicable.
Identify opportunities to simplify and improve testing tools and processes while minimizing disruption to engineering teams.
Define meaningful quality metrics and dashboards.

Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision insurance, including expert medical opinion.
Short-term and long-term disability insurance.
Life insurance and AD&D.
Supplemental life insurance for employees, spouses, and children.
Health care and dependent care Flexible Spending Accounts.
Pre-tax commuter and parking benefits.
401(k) Savings and Investment Plan with company match.
Paid time off, including flexible or accrued vacation depending on eligibility and position; vacation accrual varies by hours worked and tenure.
11 paid holidays.
Paid sick leave: 72 hours upon hire, refreshed each calendar year, with unused hours carrying over up to a 112-hour cap.
Paid parental leave.
Adoption assistance.
Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
Financial planning and group legal benefits.
Voluntary benefits, including auto, homeowner, and pet insurance.
May be eligible for bonus, equity, and compensation deferral.