Principal Software Engineer, Core Infrastructure

Oracle•Nashville, TN

1d•$114,600 - $234,600

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. In this hands-on individual-contributor role, the engineer will work across the Control Plane and Data Plane, designing and delivering capabilities involving APIs, configuration management, distributed workflows, traffic processing, and runtime performance. The role calls for deep systems-engineering knowledge and the ability to move across components, learn unfamiliar technologies, and solve problems end to end. The team is leading a charter in AI-driven platform development. The engineer will help shape the use of AI to design, build, test, and operate production systems, while applying rigorous judgment to correctness, security, reliability, and maintainability. The role suits an engineer who combines strong coding skills with architectural judgment, takes ownership of complex problems, and elevates the team's technical quality through implementation, collaboration, and mentorship.

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.

Nice To Haves

Experience with L7 proxies, API gateways, load balancers, service meshes, or ingress platforms, including technologies such as 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.

Responsibilities

Own features end to end, 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, with measurable improvements and 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 balancing customer needs, delivery timelines, and long-term maintainability.
Collaborate with engineering, product, security, and operations; provide design and code reviews; and mentor other engineers.