Principal Software Engineer, Core Infrastructure

Oracle•Seattle, WA

About The Position

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is seeking a Principal Software Engineer (IC4) for its Database and Host Automation team. The team builds services and host agents that manage database infrastructure at scale, including provisioning, lifecycle management, live database migrations, maintenance, recovery, and region bootstrap. This is an opportunity to design and build new automation services and secure host execution capabilities, connecting fleet-wide orchestration with reliable database and operating system operations on individual hosts to improve availability, consistency, and operational safety while minimizing customer disruption. The engineer independently drives complex projects from architecture through production operation, collaborating with database, infrastructure, and security teams. The role leads development and begins architecting scalable, elastic distributed systems; defines and enforces scalability requirements; designs fault-tolerant and upgradeable systems; establishes KPIs and telemetry; and proactively diagnoses production issues. The position also implements security controls, supports compliance documentation, and develops infrastructure-as-code and automation for safe patching, updates, and rollbacks. The role owns initiatives from requirements and design through implementation, validation, deployment, and ongoing operation. It includes technical leadership through design and code reviews, mentoring, improving engineering and operational practices, and supporting hiring through interviews and technical assessments. On-call participation and serving as a technical escalation point are expected.

Responsibilities

Design and build scalable, highly available automation services and host agents with typed, versioned APIs that support rolling deployments.
Develop durable asynchronous workflows with idempotency, safe retries, distributed locking, fencing, and failure recovery.
Build reusable automation for database provisioning, migration, maintenance, recovery, inventory management, and coordinated fleet operations.
Modernize existing tooling through phased migration to reviewed agent operations and workflows, supporting region bootstrap, safe upgrades, and rollback while protecting availability and data integrity.
Drive operational readiness through SLOs, metrics, dashboards, alerts, tracing, and runbooks; reduce manual intervention and recurring failures.
Participate in on-call and act as a technical escalation point, leading complex incident investigations, root cause analysis, and corrective actions.
Implement least-privilege execution, authentication, authorization, and secure communication, including controls for host validation, concurrency, and resource consumption.
Drive automated testing for correctness, integration, concurrency, performance, and failure recovery while meeting OCI security and engineering standards.
Own complex initiatives from requirements and design through implementation, validation, deployment, and production operation.
Translate ambiguous requirements into milestones, manage dependencies and risks, and communicate tradeoffs affecting customers, partner teams, and business goals.
Collaborate across teams and lead design and code reviews to deliver integrated, maintainable, and operationally safe solutions.
Mentor engineers, improve shared components and engineering practices, and support hiring through interviews and technical assessments.
Architect scalable, elastic distributed systems and define scalability requirements for owned components.
Optimize code and data paths for high-throughput, hyperscale workloads and use data-plane platforms for large-scale retrieval, storage, and processing.
Design fault-tolerant, in-service-upgradable systems using redundancy, replication, failover, and partition policies; apply load-shedding, throttling, and rate-limiting to address network unreliability while meeting SLOs.
Establish KPIs and telemetry, build proactive dashboards and alerts, and design validation such as fault injection and brownouts, along with replication and synchronization for correctness and durability.
Proactively diagnose and resolve production issues, mentor peers, and ensure operational readiness.
Implement robust security controls, execute remediation, maintain compliance documentation, and develop infrastructure-as-code and automation for safe patching, updates, and rollbacks within change-management plans.