Principal Platform Software Engineer

Oracle•Nashville, TN

6d•$104,500 - $234,600

About The Position

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) team offers the opportunity to build and operate massive-scale, integrated cloud services in a broadly distributed, multi-tenant cloud environment. OCI builds cloud products for customers who are solving some of the world's largest technical and business challenges. OCI Container Instances (CI) is OCI's managed serverless container offering. CI enables customers to deploy, operate and scale on OCI without the need for container orchestration, through seamless integration with OCI Compute, Networking, Storage, Identity, Security, Observability, and Developer services. We are seeking a Principal Platform Software Engineer (IC4) who enjoys building reliable software systems and solving challenging engineering problems at the intersection of Linux, virtualization and cloud computing. This role is ideal for engineers with strong software development and system administration fundamentals. As part of the CI team, you will design, develop, test, deploy and operate software that provisions, upgrades and manages containers across OCI regions. You will work on Linux virtualization, hypervisor development and imaging for containerized cloud workloads. The role requires strong expertise in QEMU/KVM, container runtimes, networking, storage, systemd, security and OS image creation. Engineers on this team have end-to-end ownership—from design and implementation through production operations—and contribute directly to the reliability, scalability, and customer experience of one of OCI's foundational cloud-native services.

Requirements

BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
6+ years of experience building and operating production software systems, preferably distributed systems or cloud services.
Strong system administration experience in Linux, including bash/shell scripting.
Strong programming experience in Java or Go.
Strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, operating systems, networking, and distributed systems.
Experience working with containers, Docker, Kubernetes, or related cloud-native technologies.
Experience with CI/CD systems, automated testing, and modern software development practices.
Experience using AI-assisted software development tools to improve engineering productivity across coding, testing, debugging, and documentation while maintaining high standards for code quality, security, and engineering judgment.
Experience using Terraform for Infrastructure as Code
Strong debugging, troubleshooting, and problem-solving skills.
Excellent communication skills with a strong sense of ownership and the ability to collaborate effectively across teams.

Nice To Haves

Experience with QEMU/KVM: launching and managing VMs, working with virtual devices like virtio-net and virtio-iscsi, performance profiling, troubleshooting.
Experience with container technologies like Docker or OCI containers and container runtimes such as crio, containerd/runc.
Strong knowledge of Linux internals: namespaces, cgroups (v1 & v2), networking, and storage subsystems
Hands-on experience with systemd: writing and managing unit files, controlling resource allocation, and understanding service lifecycles
Ability to set up Linux bridges, veth pairs, and configure custom network namespaces and routing
Experience with block storage: LUKS encryption, LVM logical volumes, and virtual disk provisioning (e.g., virtio-iscsi)
Familiarity with security best practices for virtual machines and containers, including disk encryption and secure bootstrapping
Experience in debugging with tools like strace, tcpdump, or wireshark, and analyzing logs. Ability to analyze core dumps with gdb would be a plus.

Responsibilities

Design, develop, test, deploy and operate software that provisions, upgrades and manages containers across OCI regions.
Work on Linux virtualization, hypervisor development and imaging for containerized cloud workloads.
Have end-to-end ownership—from design and implementation through production operations.
Contribute directly to the reliability, scalability, and customer experience of one of OCI's foundational cloud-native services.
Experience operating highly available production services, including on-call rotations, incident response, and driving operational excellence.