Principal Software Engineer, Core Infrastructure
About The Position
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure builds and operates large-scale cloud services in a distributed, multi-tenant environment. The SPLAT team owns critical platform services for secure API routing, service registration, traffic management, private connectivity, authentication, and operational controls. These services sit in the request path for more than 300 OCI control planes and process hundreds of billions of API requests each month. The Principal Software Engineer is a hands-on technical leader who owns substantial systems and cross-service initiatives. The role leads architecture and delivery, writes and reviews production code, resolves complex operational problems, influences partner teams, and develops other engineers. It requires strong distributed-systems judgment and the ability to make progress amid unclear requirements, ownership, or failure domains. The engineer will lead significant initiatives from problem definition and design through implementation, rollout, adoption, and production validation; establish scalability and operational practices; provide architectural direction; mentor engineers; and align SPLAT and partner teams on technical decisions and execution. The role also calls for responsible use of modern development and AI-assisted tools to improve engineering quality and productivity.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- At least 8 years of experience designing, building, and operating production backend or platform services.
- Strong development experience in Java or another modern object-oriented language.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, concurrency, fault tolerance, and production operations.
- Experience leading substantial technical initiatives across multiple engineers or teams.
- Demonstrated ability to diagnose complex production issues and improve service reliability.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with high-throughput, low-latency services, HTTP, networking, proxies, or API gateways.
- Experience with authentication, authorization, TLS, certificates, private connectivity, or multi-tenant security.
- Experience with throttling, load shedding, caching, and capacity planning.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and deployment automation.
- Experience improving a broader engineering organization through mentoring, shared tooling, or technical standards.
Responsibilities
- Lead significant systems and initiatives from problem definition and design through implementation, rollout, adoption, and production validation.
- Translate scalability, security, reliability, and business requirements into clear technical designs and execution plans.
- Make tradeoffs involving availability, consistency, latency, throughput, durability, cost, and operational complexity.
- Design for partial failures, retries, duplicate requests, mixed-version deployments, dependency degradation, and regional disruption.
- Write and review secure, maintainable, well-tested Java code.
- Define service contracts, compatibility requirements, migration plans, validation strategies, and rollback criteria.
- Establish capacity models, performance objectives, scaling strategies, and load-testing plans for high-throughput services.
- Design throttling, load shedding, backpressure, caching, concurrency, and failure-recovery mechanisms.
- Define service indicators, objectives, metrics, alarms, dashboards, runbooks, and deployment safeguards.
- Lead complex incident investigations and turn recurring failures or manual procedures into automation and preventive engineering improvements.
- Serve as a technical escalation point for issues spanning application, infrastructure, network, or organizational boundaries.
- Provide architectural direction in critical areas such as routing, authentication, private connectivity, runtime performance, observability, or deployment infrastructure.
- Decompose broad initiatives so multiple engineers can own meaningful work while preserving architectural consistency.
- Mentor engineers through design, code review, delivery, and incident response.
- Improve engineering quality through reusable systems, tools, standards, and operational practices.
- Contribute to hiring and identify architectural investments, platform gaps, and reliability risks for the team roadmap.
- Align SPLAT and partner teams on technical decisions, responsibilities, dependencies, and rollout plans.
- Communicate complex designs, tradeoffs, risks, and progress clearly to engineers and leaders.
- Make progress under ambiguity by distinguishing facts, assumptions, reversible decisions, and external dependencies.
- Adjust direction when production evidence or new technical information invalidates earlier assumptions.
- Use modern development and AI-assisted tools responsibly to improve engineering quality and productivity.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance, including expert medical opinion.
- Short-term and long-term disability.
- Life insurance and AD&D.
- Supplemental life insurance for employees, spouses, and children.
- Health care and dependent care Flexible Spending Accounts.
- Pre-tax commuter and parking benefits.
- 401(k) Savings and Investment Plan with company match.
- Flexible or accrued vacation, depending on employee eligibility and position.
- 11 paid holidays.
- Paid sick leave.
- Paid parental leave.
- Adoption assistance.
- Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
- Financial planning and group legal benefits.
- Voluntary auto, homeowner, and pet insurance.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
