Principal Software Engineer, Core Infrastructure

Oracle•Nashville, TN

About The Position

Oracle is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to help build the next generation of its L7 Proxy platform, which carries critical application traffic through reliable, secure, high-performance networking services. This hands-on individual-contributor role spans the Control Plane and Data Plane, including APIs, configuration management, distributed workflows, traffic processing, and runtime performance. The engineer will apply systems-engineering expertise and work across components and technologies to solve problems end to end. The role contributes to an AI-driven platform development charter, shaping how AI is used to design, build, test, and operate production systems. It requires rigorous judgment around correctness, security, reliability, and maintainability, along with ownership of complex problems, architectural decision-making, collaboration, and mentorship. Oracle describes its work as bringing together data, infrastructure, applications, and expertise to support innovations and critical services. Its products and services incorporate AI, and the company offers competitive benefits, including flexible medical, life insurance, and retirement options, as well as employee volunteer programs.

Requirements

Strong software engineering experience building and operating production services, with demonstrated ownership of complex features or subsystems.
Excellent coding, debugging, and problem-solving skills in one or more systems or backend languages, such as Java, Go, C++, or Rust, and ability to become productive in additional languages.
Strong foundations in data structures, algorithms, concurrency, operating systems, and distributed systems.
Experience with cloud service control planes, distributed backend services, proxies, or network data planes, and ability and interest to contribute across both Control Plane and Data Plane.
Solid understanding of networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, HTTP, TLS, DNS, connection management, and load balancing.
Experience designing APIs and reliable workflows, including persistence, asynchronous processing, retries, idempotency, and failure handling.
Ability to diagnose production issues using logs, metrics, traces, profiling, and systematic analysis.
Sound engineering judgment around security, testing, backward compatibility, deployment safety, and operational reliability.
Ability to use AI-assisted engineering tools effectively and critically evaluate generated code, designs, and recommendations.
Clear written and verbal communication, strong collaboration skills, and ability to drive work independently through ambiguity.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Minimum qualification: 11 years of software development experience; or a relevant B.Tech or bachelor's degree and 7 years of software development experience; or a relevant M.Tech or master's degree and 5 years of software development experience; or a relevant doctorate and 3 years of software development experience.
Demonstrated ability to analyze and interpret data to produce actionable business insights.
Demonstrated ability to use agile methodologies to drive continuous improvement and product delivery.
Demonstrated ability or knowledge in automation, including designing, implementing, and managing automated tools, processes, or systems.
Demonstrated knowledge of and adherence to regulatory, legal, and organizational compliance requirements.
Demonstrated ability or knowledge in quality assurance, including adherence to standards and quality control measures.
Demonstrated ability or knowledge in scripting languages, including writing and maintaining scripts to improve system efficiency.
Demonstrated ability to develop and execute software test plans.
Demonstrated ability or knowledge in user experience development, including designing intuitive and effective interfaces and content.
Demonstrated ability to conduct in-depth code reviews for software quality assurance.
Demonstrated ability to develop embedded systems, balancing hardware and software for performance.
Demonstrated ability to provide software effort and complexity estimates for project planning and scheduling.
At least 3 years of academic or professional experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, Google, or Oracle Cloud.
At least 5 years of experience working in system-level testing and automation.
At least 4 years of experience delivering and operating large-scale distributed systems.

Nice To Haves

Experience with L7 proxies, API gateways, load balancers, service meshes, or ingress platforms, including Envoy, NGINX, or HAProxy.
Experience delivering changes spanning customer-facing APIs, configuration propagation, and runtime traffic behavior.
Knowledge of HTTP/2, HTTP/3, gRPC, WebSockets, routing, traffic policies, or certificate management.
Experience with high-throughput, low-latency systems, performance profiling, and capacity planning.
Experience operating multi-tenant cloud services, including tenant isolation, resource limits, and failure containment.
Experience with Kubernetes, containers, infrastructure automation, and CI/CD.
Experience building AI agents or integrating AI into engineering and operational workflows, including evaluation, tool integration, and human review.
A record of improving engineering practices and mentoring engineers through hands-on technical leadership.
Preferred qualifications repeat the listed software development education and experience pathways; the preferred section also lists one year of experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, Google, or Oracle Cloud.

Responsibilities

Own features end to end by translating customer and platform needs into technical designs, production code, tests, deployment plans, and operational readiness.
Build across the Control Plane and Data Plane, including APIs, resource lifecycle workflows, configuration distribution and reconciliation, proxy behavior, traffic management, protocol handling, and runtime capabilities.
Design reliable distributed systems that address concurrency, consistency, retries, idempotency, failure recovery, and backward compatibility across component boundaries.
Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks involving latency, throughput, CPU, memory, connections, and resource utilization.
Build and adopt AI-assisted workflows for development, testing, debugging, and operations, measuring improvements and applying appropriate validation.
Improve observability, automated testing, rollout safety, and resilience; participate in on-call rotations, incident response, and root-cause analysis.
Evaluate technical alternatives, document tradeoffs, and deliver practical solutions that balance customer needs, delivery timelines, and long-term maintainability.
Collaborate across engineering, product, security, and operations; provide design and code reviews; and mentor other engineers.