Principal Software Engineer

Oracle•Seattle, WA

19d•$114,600 - $234,600

About The Position

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) builds and operates cloud services, and OCI Queue provides managed, durable messaging for asynchronous communication, traffic-spike absorption, and reliable work processing. The Principal Software Engineer will shape OCI Queue’s architecture and develop capabilities balancing durability, correctness, performance, scalability, and operational simplicity. The work spans customer-facing APIs, queue management workflows, request routing, and replicated storage. This is a hands-on technical leadership role with ownership from design and implementation through testing, deployment, and production operations. The role includes leading distributed messaging design and implementation; improving service performance, capacity utilization, availability, and failure recovery; designing reliable APIs and durable workflows; and driving automated testing, failure injection, performance qualification, and safe production rollouts. It also involves investigating production issues, participating in on-call operations, partnering with product and engineering teams to establish technical direction, and mentoring engineers through design and code reviews. The broader responsibilities cover software development and coding, architecture and system design, customer issue and defect collaboration, security and coding-standards compliance, system maintenance, project planning and execution, cross-organizational collaboration, problem solving, continuous learning and improvement, and participation in candidate interviews. Oracle lists a U.S. hiring range of $114,600 to $234,600 per annum; the role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, and compensation deferral.

Requirements

Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science or a related technical discipline, or comparable professional experience.
At least six years developing production software, including substantial experience delivering distributed systems or cloud services.
Proficiency in Java or Go, including concurrent programming, debugging, and performance analysis.
Solid understanding of algorithms, data structures, operating systems, networking, and storage fundamentals.
Practical knowledge of distributed-system behavior, including consistency, replication, retries, idempotency, partial failures, and recovery.
Experience designing service APIs and evolving interfaces without disrupting existing consumers.
Experience establishing automated unit, integration, and performance tests, supported by CI/CD practices.
Experience operating production services, including monitoring, troubleshooting, incident response, and participation in on-call rotations.
Demonstrated ability to lead complex engineering work, communicate architectural decisions, and collaborate across teams.
Sound engineering judgment when using AI-assisted development tools, including independently verifying correctness, security, and maintainability.

Nice To Haves

Experience building messaging systems, distributed storage, event-processing platforms, or similar infrastructure services.
Familiarity with Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS, Azure Service Bus, or OCI Queue.
Experience with Paxos or Raft, replicated state machines, durable logs, checkpoints, and crash recovery.
Understanding of ordering guarantees, producer deduplication, delivery acknowledgements, visibility timeouts, and dead-letter handling.
Experience with partitioning, load balancing, backpressure, resource quotas, capacity planning, and online workload migration.
Experience with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, metadata caching, and asynchronous control-plane workflows.
Experience profiling JVM or Go applications and diagnosing Linux networking, CPU, memory, and storage bottlenecks.
Familiarity with containers, infrastructure automation, Terraform, and staged deployment practices.
Experience designing secure multi-tenant services, including authorization, encryption, tenant isolation, and operational safeguards.
A record of influencing architecture across teams and improving engineering practices through mentoring, reviews, and clear technical documentation.

Responsibilities

Lead the design and implementation of distributed messaging capabilities, including ordered delivery, deduplication, message lifecycle management, and workload isolation.
Improve service performance, capacity utilization, availability, and recovery under failures.
Design reliable APIs and durable workflows while maintaining compatibility across service components and deployments.
Drive automated testing, failure injection, performance qualification, and safe production rollouts.
Investigate complex production issues, participate in on-call operations, and deliver lasting reliability improvements.
Partner with product management and engineering teams to evaluate tradeoffs and establish technical direction; mentor engineers through design and code reviews.
Design software solutions, analyze requirements, and share results with management upon completion.
Guide execution across software development lifecycle phases and coach engineers to improve development practices.
Develop and guide software features and enhancements, lead design specifications, ensure accessibility, and document software design and code.
Lead code reviews and conduct debugging and troubleshooting to identify and fix complex software issues.
Implement functional and non-functional testing, quality assurance, error logging, monitoring, and observability.
Profile and optimize performance, build scalable solutions, and anticipate and resolve potential issues.
Troubleshoot complex API functionality and integration issues and implement API versioning, lifecycle, and interoperability strategies.
Contribute to software, systems, and services design; recommend project or design scope; and provide technical guidance on architecture.
Contribute to architectural reviews, promote adherence to architectural standards, and collaborate with stakeholders to align work with architecture.
Implement performance optimization and scalability strategies and, when needed, research and evaluate technology for architectural changes.
Collaborate with stakeholders on customer issues, provide advanced technical support when needed, advocate for customer interests, and suggest product enhancements based on feedback.
Develop customer issue and defect handling and training processes, and investigate complex maintenance issues to agree on short- and long-term solutions.
Follow development practices and coding standards, participate in peer reviews, provide technical leadership, and implement secure coding practices.
Perform periodic system maintenance and testing, including upgrades or vulnerability patching, and improve automation, testing, debugging, availability, health, support, and reliability.
Coordinate project tasks, monitor timelines and deliverables, prioritize work across projects, and adjust plans when resources or timelines change.
Collaborate across the organization and use understanding of business leaders, stakeholders, and customers to ensure solutions meet their needs; seek and respect diverse perspectives.
Analyze information to address issues, escalate critical or unresolved problems with assessments and proposed solutions, and document problem-solving strategies.
Pursue learning and feedback, stay current with industry practices, and coach and mentor junior team members.
Recommend and implement process improvements, solicit feedback on approaches, and evaluate their impact.
Participate in candidate interviews, assess candidates, and provide hiring recommendations.

Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision insurance, including expert medical opinion.
Short-term and long-term disability insurance.
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 eligibility and position classification.
11 paid holidays.
Paid sick leave: 72 hours upon hire, refreshed each calendar year, with unused balance carrying over up to a 112-hour cap.
Paid parental leave.
Adoption assistance.
Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
Financial planning and group legal benefits.
Voluntary auto, homeowner, and pet insurance benefits.
The role may be eligible for bonus, equity, and compensation deferral.