Principal Software Engineer, Core Infrastructure

Oracle • Nashville, TN

6d

About The Position

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s SPLAT team owns critical platform services providing secure API routing, service registration, traffic management, private connectivity, authentication, and operational controls for OCI services. The services sit in the request path for more than 300 OCI control planes and process hundreds of billions of API requests each month. The team’s engineering work spans high-throughput Java services, distributed systems, networking, security, observability, capacity management, deployment automation, and production reliability.

This hands-on technical leadership role owns substantial systems and cross-service initiatives. The engineer leads architecture and delivery, writes and reviews production code, resolves complex operational problems, influences partner teams, and develops other engineers. Success requires sound distributed-systems judgment and the ability to make progress when requirements, ownership, or failure domains are unclear.

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.
• The qualifications section also specifies 11 years of software development experience; alternatively, a relevant bachelor’s degree and 7 years, a relevant master’s degree and 5 years, or a relevant doctorate and 3 years of software development experience.
• At least 3 years of academic or professional experience with cloud platforms.
• 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.
• Demonstrated ability or knowledge in data analysis, agile methodologies, automation, compliance, quality assurance, scripting languages, software test plans, user experience development, code review, embedded systems, and software estimation.

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.
• The preferred qualifications section lists the same software-development education and experience alternatives as the minimum qualifications.
• The preferred qualifications section lists 1 year of experience with cloud platforms under People Leadership / Management Experience.

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 technical designs and execution plans.
• Make tradeoffs involving availability, consistency, latency, throughput, durability, cost, and operational complexity.
• Design systems to handle 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 problems 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 maintaining 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

• Competitive benefits supporting employees with flexible medical, life insurance, and retirement options.
• Volunteer programs that encourage employees to give back to their communities.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal