Principal Core Infrastructure Engineer

Oracle•Nashville, TN

90d•$114,600 - $234,600

About The Position

The role will provide technical leadership for the architecture, design, and evolution of OCI’s high-performance virtual networking dataplane. This role is responsible for shaping the systems and engineering direction behind foundational networking capabilities, including packet processing, routing, network address translation, virtual network gateways, traffic management, and security-policy enforcement in a highly scalable, multi-tenant cloud environment. The engineer will define and drive the architecture for dataplane services that must deliver high throughput, low latency, strong tenant isolation, fault tolerance, and operational simplicity at cloud scale. They will make critical technical decisions across C/C++ systems design, concurrency, memory management, performance optimization, Linux networking, distributed control-plane integration, and fast dataplane technologies such as DPDK, VirtIO, eBPF/XDP, SR-IOV, SmartNICs, and userspace packet-processing frameworks. This role leads complex initiatives from early technical strategy through architecture, implementation, testing, rollout, and long-term operation. The Principal Engineer will establish design patterns and technical standards for safe, observable, recoverable services; guide the design of resilient mechanisms such as health checks, failover, graceful draining, rollback, and recovery; and ensure features can withstand failures, in-service updates, traffic spikes, and evolving customer requirements without disruption. The Principal Engineer will also influence how the organization measures and operates dataplane health. They will drive investments in metrics, telemetry, dashboards, alarms, canaries, diagnostic tooling, automated validation, and incident learning. They will lead investigation of the most complex performance and production issues, using system and network-level evidence to identify root causes and create durable improvements. Success in this role requires broad technical depth as well as strong cross-functional leadership. The Principal Engineer will partner with control-plane, infrastructure, security, hardware, operations, and product teams to align architecture and execution across service boundaries. They will mentor engineers, raise the quality of design and code reviews, clarify difficult technical tradeoffs, and create reusable engineering practices that improve the reliability, performance, security, and delivery velocity of OCI virtual networking.

Requirements

C/C++ systems design
concurrency
memory management
performance optimization
Linux networking
distributed control-plane integration
DPDK
VirtIO
eBPF/XDP
SR-IOV
SmartNICs
userspace packet-processing frameworks

Responsibilities

Design and implement major C and C++ features for OCI’s high-performance virtual networking dataplane, including routing, NAT, network gateways, and security-policy enforcement.
Own complex packet-processing components that support scalable, multi-tenant cloud networking.
Drive performance improvements across CPU utilization, memory use, concurrency, latency, throughput, and packet-processing efficiency.
Apply and evolve fast dataplane technologies such as DPDK, VirtIO, Linux networking, eBPF/XDP, SR-IOV, SmartNICs, and userspace packet-processing frameworks.
Define and execute performance, scale, stress, and load tests; use results to identify bottlenecks and deliver measurable improvements.
Lead system-level design and code reviews, ensuring solutions meet expectations for performance, correctness, reliability, and maintainability.
Design and build fault-tolerant gateway and dataplane components that remain available through host failures, network disruptions, and in-service software updates.
Implement resilient patterns including health checks, graceful draining, retries, timeouts, failover, rollback, and recovery.
Develop fault-injection, brownout, failure-recovery, and availability tests for critical network paths.
Drive safe change management through automated validation, staged rollouts, monitoring, rollback, and recovery procedures.
Define and improve metrics, alarms, dashboards, telemetry, canaries, and health checks for dataplane services.
Independently diagnose and resolve complex Linux, networking, performance, and production issues using logs, metrics, traces, packet captures, profilers, and core dumps.
Build runbooks, diagnostic tools, and operational automation that reduce time to detect, mitigate, and recover from incidents.
Participate in on-call, lead incident investigations for owned components, and deliver durable corrective actions.
Design and implement features that enforce strong tenant isolation, secure traffic handling, and policy enforcement.
Partner with security teams to identify, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities and operational risks.
Ensure designs, documentation, and operational practices meet applicable security, compliance, and change-management requirements.
Build and maintain automation and infrastructure-as-code for service development, deployment, monitoring, and operations.
Improve deployment safety through automated testing, pre-production validation, progressive rollout, and rollback guardrails.
Own major platform end to end: design, implementation, testing, deployment, production validation, and ongoing support.
Independently plan and execute complex work, identifying risks, dependencies, and tradeoffs early.
Manage priorities across multiple initiatives and communicate progress, decisions, and blockers clearly.
Break ambiguous technical problems into deliverable milestones and drive them to completion.
Collaborate across networking, control-plane, infrastructure, security, hardware, and operations teams to deliver shared outcomes.
Lead technical discussions for owned areas and provide thoughtful design and code-review feedback.
Mentor less-experienced engineers in systems programming, debugging, operational practices, and reliable service ownership.
Document technical decisions and contribute to team standards, reusable patterns, and engineering knowledge.
Resolve complex, cross-layer issues by analyzing evidence from systems, networking, and production telemetry.
Make sound tradeoffs among performance, reliability, security, maintainability, and delivery speed.
Identify and lead practical improvements to development, testing, deployment, observability, and operational workflows.
Stay current with C/C++, cloud networking, Linux, and high-performance dataplane technologies; share relevant knowledge with the team.

Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision insurance, including expert medical opinion
Short term disability and long term disability
Life insurance and AD&D
Supplemental life insurance (Employee/Spouse/Child)
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
11 paid holidays
72 hours of paid sick leave upon date of hire. Refreshes each calendar year. Unused balance will carry over each year up to a maximum cap of 112 hours.
Paid parental leave
Adoption assistance
Employee Stock Purchase Plan
Financial planning and group legal
Voluntary benefits including auto, homeowner and pet insurance