Principal Software Engineer, Core Infrastructure

Oracle•Seattle, WA

3d•$114,600 - $234,600

About The Position

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is hiring a Principal Software Engineer (IC4) for its Database and Host Automation team. The team builds services and host agents that manage database infrastructure at scale, including provisioning, lifecycle management, live database migrations, maintenance, recovery, and region bootstrap. This is a greenfield opportunity to design and build automation services and secure host execution capabilities, connecting fleet-wide orchestration with reliable database and operating system operations on individual hosts. The engineer will independently drive complex projects from architecture through production operation, collaborating with database, infrastructure, and security teams. As a technical leader, the engineer will guide design decisions, deliver robust software, mentor engineers, and improve engineering and operational practices across the organization. The role leads development and architecture of scalable distributed systems, establishes scalability requirements, optimizes high-throughput code and data paths, designs fault-tolerant and upgradeable systems, establishes operational telemetry and validation, resolves production issues, implements security controls, and develops infrastructure-as-code and automation for safe patching, updates, and rollbacks.

Responsibilities

Design and build scalable, highly available automation services and host agents with typed, versioned APIs that support rolling deployments.
Develop durable workflows and asynchronous operations with idempotency, safe retries, distributed locking, fencing, and failure recovery, balancing consistency, availability, performance, and security.
Build reusable automation for database provisioning, migration, maintenance, recovery, inventory management, and coordinated fleet operations.
Modernize existing tooling through phased migration to reviewed agent operations and workflows, supporting region bootstrap, safe upgrades, and rollback while protecting availability and data integrity.
Drive operational readiness through SLOs, metrics, dashboards, alerts, tracing, and runbooks, reducing manual intervention and recurring failures.
Participate in on-call and serve as a technical escalation point, leading complex incident investigations, root cause analysis, and corrective actions.
Implement least-privilege execution, authentication, authorization, and secure communication, with controls for host validation, concurrency, and resource consumption.
Drive automated testing for correctness, integration, concurrency, performance, and failure recovery while meeting OCI security and engineering standards.
Independently own complex initiatives from requirements and design through implementation, validation, deployment, and production operation.
Translate ambiguous requirements into milestones, manage dependencies and risks, and communicate tradeoffs affecting customers, partner teams, and business goals.
Collaborate across teams and lead design and code reviews to deliver integrated, maintainable, and operationally safe solutions.
Mentor engineers, improve shared components and engineering practices, and support hiring through interviews and technical assessments.
Optimize code and data paths for high-throughput, hyper-scale workloads and leverage data plane platforms for large-scale retrieval, storage, and processing.
Design fault-tolerant, in-service-upgradable systems using redundancy, replication, failover, and partition policies; apply load-shedding, throttling, and rate-limiting to address network unreliability while meeting SLOs.
Establish KPIs and telemetry, build proactive dashboards and alerts, and design validation such as fault injection and brownouts, as well as replication and synchronization for correctness and durability.
Proactively diagnose and resolve production issues, mentor peers, and ensure operational readiness.
Execute security remediation, maintain compliance documentation, and develop IaC and automation for safe patching, updates, and rollbacks within change-management plans.