Lead Principal Platform Software Engineer

Oracle; Denver (CO); On-site; USD 97,000 - 306,000; Full time

Job summary

Oracle is seeking an IC5 engineer to lead the design and operation of Oracle Streaming, Queue, and Managed Kafka services within OCI. You will guide architecture, reliability, and scalability, mentoring engineers and driving cross-team collaboration to deliver mission-critical cloud infrastructure.

You will own the full service lifecycle—design, implementation, deployment, on-call, and continuous improvement—while partnering with product management to translate customer needs into roadmaps and

Qualifications

• 15 years of professional experience in large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep expertise in Apache Kafka including Raft/Zookeeper/KRaft internals.
• Experience with RabbitMQ/ActiveMQ and AMQP semantics.
• Hands-on Kubernetes experience with stateful workloads.
• Proficiency in Java, Go, or similar languages.
• Experience operating at scale with production debugging and capacity modeling.
• Strong technical leadership and mentoring across teams.
• Experience with OCI, AWS, Azure, GCP and deployment frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership for Oracle’s messaging and eventing ecosystem.
• Define architecture, reliability, and scalability strategy for core services.
• Architect and operate distributed, highly available systems for real-time data ingestion and streaming.
• Drive the technical roadmap for Streaming, Queue, and Managed Kafka services.
• Lead multi-tenant, scalable architectures across OCI regions.
• Collaborate with storage, networking, observability, and security teams.
• Mentor engineers and raise engineering standards.
• Own service lifecycle from design to deployment and on-call.
• Partner with product management to translate customer needs into roadmaps.
• Contribute to broader platform vision.

Skills

Distributed systems design

Apache Kafka

RabbitMQ / ActiveMQ

Kubernetes

Java / Go

Cloud platforms (OCI, AWS, Azure, GCP)

Technical leadership

Communication

Tools

Terraform

CI/CD

Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

Grafana

Job description

Job Description

In this role, you’ll contribute to the platform’s design and development, overseeing in-house engineering, design reviews, system integration, and operational enhancements. This role isn’t just about shipping features—it’s about elevating engineering standards within OCI. You’ll lead large, impactful projects, collaborate across engineering, product, and operations teams, and mentor engineers at all levels, helping shape a vision for exceptional cloud infrastructure.

Responsibilities

As a IC5 engineer, you will provide technical leadership for Oracle’s messaging and eventing ecosystem — including but not limited to Oracle Streaming, Oracle Queue, and Oracle Streaming Service with Apache Kafka services. You will define the architecture, reliability, and scalability strategy for these core services, enabling event-driven and streaming workloads across Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

You will:

• Architect, design, and operate distributed, highly available, and resilient systems supporting real-time data ingestion, message queuing, and stream processing at massive scale.

• Define and drive the technical roadmap for Streaming, Queue, and Managed Kafka services.

• Lead system design for multi-tenant, horizontally scalable, and cost-efficient architectures that deliver consistent latency, throughput, and durability across OCI regions.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with storage, networking, observability, and security teams to deliver new platform features, enforce secure-by-default designs, and improve overall fleet reliability.

• Mentor and guide engineers in distributed systems design, high-scale data processing, and operational excellence; set and raise engineering standards across multiple teams.

• Drive operational excellence by owning service-level objectives (availability, latency, durability) and reducing toil through automation, observability, and self-healing mechanisms.

• Own the full service lifecycle from design and implementation to deployment, on-call, and continuous improvement — maintaining high code and reliability standards.

• Partner with product management and field teams to translate customer needs into roadmap priorities for Oracle Streaming and Queue services.

• Contribute to the broader platform vision, influencing how Oracle’s messaging and eventing services evolve to support mission-critical workloads globally.

Must Have Qualifications

• 15 years of professional experience developing and operating large-scale, distributed systems or cloud-native services.

• Deep expertise in Apache Kafka, including Raft/Zookeeper/KRaft internals, performance, latency and operating production Kafka clusters at scale.

• Strong hands-on experience with message queuing systems such as RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, or equivalent enterprise queue technologies, including understanding of AMQP protocols and queue semantics (FIFO, DLQ, fan-out, and priority).

• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, including deployment, scaling, and operating stateful workloads in containerized environments.

• Proficiency in Java, Go, or similar object-oriented languages; ability to produce high-quality, performant, and maintainable code.

• Experience with operating at scale — production debugging, performance tuning, capacity modeling, and regional failover strategies.

• Demonstrated technical leadership, influencing architecture and execution across multiple teams, and mentoring other senior engineers. Excellent communication skills, able to articulate complex designs and trade-offs clearly across engineering and product stakeholders.

• Experience with cloud platforms (OCI, AWS, Azure, GCP) and modern deployment frameworks (Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD).

Nice to Have Qualifications

• Experience designing or operating Tier-0 or mission-critical services, with stringent SLAs for availability, latency, and durability.

• Experience contributing to or extending open-source messaging systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Pulsar, Flink).

• Familiarity with observability stacks (Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Grafana) and operational excellence principles (SLOs, SLIs, error budgets).

• Understanding of OCI-specific services, IAM integration, and region/fault-domain isolation models.

Disclaimer:

Certain U.S. based or U.S. customer or client-facing roles may be required to comply with applicable requirements, such as immunization/occupational health mandates, and/or drug testing requirements.

Range and benefit information provided in this posting are specific to the stated locations only

US: Hiring Range in USD from: $96,800 to $306,400 per annum. May be eligible for bonus, equity, and compensation deferral.

Oracle maintains broad salary ranges for its roles in order to account for variations in knowledge, skills, experience, market conditions and locations, as well as reflect Oracle’s differing products, industries and lines of business.

Candidates are typically placed into the range based on the preceding factors as well as internal peer equity.

Oracle US offers a comprehensive benefits package which includes the following:

1. Medical, dental, and vision insurance, including expert medical opinion

2. Short term disability and long term disability

3. Life insurance and AD&D

4. Supplemental life insurance (Employee/Spouse/Child)

5. Health care and dependent care Flexible Spending Accounts

6. Pre-tax commuter and parking benefits

7. 401(k) Savings and Investment Plan with company match

8. Paid time off: Flexible Vacation is provided to all eligible employees assigned to a salaried (non‑overtime eligible) position. Accrued Vacation is provided to all other employees eligible for vacation benefits. For employees working at least 35 hours per week, the vacation accrual rate is 13 days annually for the first three years of employment and 18 days annually for subsequent years of employment. Vacation accrual is prorated for employees working between 20 and 34 hours per week. Employees working fewer than 20 hours per week are not eligible for vacation.

9. 11 paid holidays

10. Paid sick leave: 72 hours of paid sick leave upon date of hire. Refreshes each calendar year. Unused balance will carry over each year up to a maximum cap of 112 hours.

11. Paid parental leave

12. Adoption assistance

13. Employee Stock Purchase Plan

14. Financial planning and group legal

15. Voluntary benefits including auto, homeowner and pet insurance

The role will generally accept applications for at least three calendar days from the posting date or as long as the job remains posted.

Career Level – IC5

About Us

Only Oracle brings together the data, infrastructure, applications, and expertise to power everything from industry innovations to life‑saving care. And with AI embedded across our products and services, we help customers turn that promise into a better future for all. Discover your potential at a company leading the way in AI and cloud solutions that impact billions of lives.

True innovation starts when everyone is empowered to contribute. That’s why we’re committed to growing a workforce that promotes opportunities for all with competitive benefits that support our people with flexible medical, life insurance, and retirement options. We also encourage employees to give back to their communities through our volunteer programs.

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Oracle is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability and protected veterans’ status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Oracle will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records pursuant to applicable law.