Senior Principal Software Engineer, Core Infrastructure

Oracle•Nashville, TN

About The Position

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Compute delivers bare metal and virtual machine instances, including CPU and GPU instances, at global scale. The Senior Principal Software Engineer will design, build, and operate OCI Compute control plane services, focusing on Imaging and Container Registry. The role combines hands-on development and architectural judgment to deliver secure, highly available, multi-tenant distributed services that scale across OCI regions. The engineer will independently solve complex problems, assess architectural tradeoffs, and lead projects from design through production. They will remain actively involved in coding, testing, debugging, deployment, on-call support, and service operations while guiding engineers working on related components. Success requires ownership, clear communication, and coordination across team boundaries, with attention to feature delivery, reliability, security, and maintainability. The role partners with Compute, Storage, Networking, Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE), OCI Functions, engineering leaders, and product management to deliver platform capabilities, address dependencies, and inform the service roadmap. It also includes investigating production issues, leading root cause analysis, improving service health, and mentoring engineers.

Requirements

At least 6 years of software development experience, including substantial experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems.
Strong proficiency in Java, including concurrency, API design, testing, and performance troubleshooting.
Strong knowledge of data structures, algorithms, operating systems, and networking fundamentals.
Understanding of distributed systems concepts, including consistency, replication, fault tolerance, idempotency, and failure recovery.
Experience delivering highly available production services and participating in on-call support, incident response, and root cause analysis.
Strong Linux development and troubleshooting skills.
Experience using metrics, logs, tracing, dashboards, and actionable alarms to assess and improve service health.
Ability to independently scope technical work, evaluate tradeoffs, and deliver service improvements.
BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
Minimum qualifications also specify one of the following software-development experience and education combinations: 12 years of experience without a specified degree; a relevant B.Tech or bachelor's degree and 8 years; a relevant M.Tech or master's degree and 6 years; or a relevant doctorate and 4 years.
Four years of professional experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, Google, or Oracle Cloud.
Eight years of experience working in testing and automation at the system level.
Four years of experience delivering and operating large-scale distributed systems.
Demonstrated ability or knowledge in data management, including designing, operationalizing, securing, and monitoring data pipelines.
Demonstrated ability or knowledge in data integration, including specifying and using services to load and manage data from various sources.

Nice To Haves

Experience building cloud control planes, image management services, container registries, or artifact distribution systems.
Familiarity with container technologies, container image formats, and image or artifact lifecycle management.
Experience with multi-tenant architectures, regional service deployments, and storage service integrations.
Experience implementing secure software supply chain capabilities, such as image signing or vulnerability scanning.
Experience with Python or Scala.
Preferred qualifications specify one of the following software-development experience and education combinations: 13 years without a specified degree; a relevant B.Tech or bachelor's degree and 9 years; a relevant M.Tech or master's degree and 7 years; or a relevant doctorate and 5 years.

Responsibilities

Design, implement, and operate resilient distributed services that support multi-tenancy, horizontal scaling, predictable performance, and cost efficiency.
Lead technical projects within Imaging and Container Registry, translating requirements into designs, implementation plans, and production-ready capabilities.
Collaborate with Compute, Storage, Networking, Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE), and OCI Functions teams to deliver platform features and resolve technical dependencies.
Apply secure-by-default design principles, including tenant isolation, authentication, authorization, and secure image and artifact lifecycle management.
Improve service-level objectives for availability, latency, and durability through observability, automation, capacity planning, and recovery mechanisms.
Own features and service components throughout their lifecycle, including design, implementation, testing, deployment, on-call support, and continuous improvement.
Investigate complex production issues, lead root cause analysis for owned components, and implement durable fixes.
Mentor engineers through design discussions, code reviews, and troubleshooting while strengthening engineering practices.
Contribute technical proposals and effort estimates to the service roadmap, partnering with engineering leaders and product management to prioritize customer needs.
Independently scope and solve complex technical work, evaluate architectural tradeoffs, and deliver improvements in reliability, performance, automation, and operational efficiency.
Communicate designs, risks, dependencies, progress, and technical decisions to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
Build effective cross-team partnerships and resolve technical disagreements constructively.
Balance customer needs and delivery timelines with long-term service health, reliability, security, and maintainability.