Principal Core Infrastructure Engineer

Oracle•Austin, TX

16d•$114,600 - $234,600

About The Position

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is hiring a Principal Core Infrastructure Engineer for its Next Gen Network Observability team. The role focuses on building cloud-scale intelligence systems that help OCI networks detect, diagnose, and respond to failures automatically, advancing self-healing networks through automated network control. The engineer will design and build distributed systems and algorithms that measure, analyze, and explain network behavior across OCI data centers and WAN. The work combines active measurements, network topology, routing state, flow signals, and switch telemetry to identify the origins of latency, congestion, packet loss, and failures. Observability insights will be converted into explainable, confidence-scored signals that automated controllers can use to steer traffic, mitigate congestion, isolate faults, and restore network health safely, with policy controls and operational safeguards. The position requires deep systems expertise and hands-on experience with networking, algorithms, telemetry, and distributed computing. It includes developing topology-aware observability, congestion-triangulation and queue-wait reconstruction algorithms, confidence-scored fault localization, and reliable production services operating at cloud scale. The engineer will also lead technical design and code reviews, mentor engineers, resolve production issues, and partner with network controller, SRE, hardware, network operations, security, AI/ML, and product teams. The role also encompasses scalability, reliability, correctness, security, and operations for OCI infrastructure. Responsibilities include designing fault-tolerant and highly available components, setting and monitoring KPIs and SLOs, creating performance and fault-injection tests, participating in operational support rotations, and developing automation and change-management practices. The position contributes to planning and execution, cross-organizational collaboration, problem solving, continuous learning and improvement, mentoring, and candidate interviews.

Requirements

6–10+ years of experience building large-scale distributed systems, network modeling software, network measurement platforms, or telemetry and observability systems.
Strong knowledge of networking fundamentals, including L2/L3 forwarding, routing, switching, BGP, ECMP, data center fabrics, queues and buffers, congestion, and packet loss.
Advanced programming experience in at least one of Java, Go, C++, Rust, or Python.
Strong understanding of algorithms, distributed systems, data structures, system reliability, and performance engineering.
Experience building systems that process high-volume, time-sensitive data and operate reliably under incomplete, delayed, or contradictory inputs.
Demonstrated ability to validate complex algorithms and models against ground truth and translate experimental results into production-quality systems.
Experience designing automated or closed-loop systems with safety controls, rollback mechanisms, and human oversight.
Track record of technical leadership, mentorship, and delivery across complex, cross-functional projects.
Experience operating production systems in cloud-scale or large enterprise environments.

Nice To Haves

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience.
Experience with one or more of active network measurement, streaming telemetry, time-series or stream processing, graph algorithms, statistical inference, probabilistic modeling, or multi-source data fusion.
Familiarity with ML pipelines and models, including data preparation, training and evaluation, deployment, versioning, monitoring, and integration into production systems.
Hands-on experience using AI-assisted development tools and workflows across the software development lifecycle.

Responsibilities

Design, implement, and maintain critical components of OCI’s Next Gen Network Observability platform.
Build scalable, topology-aware measurement, analytics, and inference systems for data center and WAN networks.
Develop algorithms for path reconstruction, congestion triangulation, queue-wait estimation, fault localization, root cause analysis, and customer-impact attribution.
Ingest and correlate signals from active probes, routing and topology systems, switches, ASICs, queues, flows, logs, metrics, events, and streaming telemetry.
Produce ranked, confidence-scored diagnoses that localize problems to the responsible path, link, queue, device, or shared network resource.
Convert observability insights into safe, explainable, controller-consumable signals for automated traffic steering, congestion mitigation, fault isolation, and service recovery.
Design control-loop safeguards that account for uncertainty, stale or conflicting evidence, policy constraints, and unintended interactions between automated actions.
Design systems that remain accurate and available despite missing or delayed telemetry, topology changes, clock uncertainty, and partial network failures.
Build validation frameworks to measure detection and localization time, accuracy, false-positive rates, confidence calibration, corrective-action effectiveness, and resilience across failure scenarios.
Apply AI-assisted software development practices across design, implementation, testing, debugging, code review, documentation, and operational analysis while maintaining engineering, security, and quality standards.
Write robust, well-tested production code in languages such as Java, Go, C++, Rust, or Python.
Own and resolve complex production issues involving distributed services, large-scale telemetry pipelines, real-time network state, and automated control workflows.
Lead design and code reviews and maintain standards for correctness, scalability, reliability, safety, and operational readiness.
Mentor engineers and establish strong engineering practices for network measurement, analytics, inference, and automated remediation systems.
Partner with network controller, SRE, hardware, network operations, security, AI/ML, and product teams to deliver closed-loop capabilities end to end.
Lead development and implementation of scalable distributed-system components; define scalability requirements; use distributed state management and data-plane platforms; optimize high-throughput processing; and design for elasticity and performance testing.
Design fault-tolerant systems with redundancy, replication, automatic failover, and in-service updates; account for network partitions and reliability tradeoffs; implement load-shedding, throttling, and rate-limiting; and design for SLOs.
Define KPIs and telemetry, and build dashboards, monitoring, and alerting to identify system gaps and issues.
Design and implement functional and correctness requirements, complex fault-injection and brown-out test scenarios, and data replication and synchronization techniques.
Diagnose, debug, and resolve issues in active systems; mentor others in troubleshooting; maintain operational readiness; and serve in operational support rotations, including incident response and root cause investigations.
Implement security measures for multi-tenant environments, including encryption and access controls; remediate security gaps; and maintain compliance and documentation.
Develop and maintain automation scripts and tools, including Infrastructure as Code, and create and follow patching, update, and rollback change-management plans.
Coordinate moderately complex tasks, monitor timelines and deliverables, delegate and prioritize work across projects, provide technical oversight, and adjust plans as needed.
Collaborate across the organization, align expectations, and ensure proposed solutions meet stakeholder and customer needs; seek and listen to diverse perspectives.
Analyze complex issues, identify solutions, escalate unresolved or critical issues with assessments and suggestions, and document problem-solving strategies.
Pursue learning and feedback, stay current with industry trends, and coach and mentor junior team members.
Recommend and implement process improvements and evaluate their impact with stakeholder feedback.
Participate in candidate interviews, assess candidates, and provide hiring recommendations.

Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision insurance, including expert medical opinion
Short-term and long-term disability
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
Flexible Vacation for eligible salaried employees or accrued vacation for other eligible employees
11 paid holidays
72 hours of paid sick leave upon hire, refreshed annually, with unused balances carrying over up to a 112-hour cap
Paid parental leave
Adoption assistance
Employee Stock Purchase Plan
Financial planning and group legal benefits
Voluntary auto, homeowner, and pet insurance