Lead Principal Platform Software Engineer, Shepherd — IC5

Oracle; Nashville (TN); On-site; USD 135,000 - 306,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid time off and vacation policy

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Paid parental leave

Additional voluntary benefits

Job summary

Oracle in Nashville is seeking a Lead Principal Platform Software Engineer to drive Shepherd's evolution in architecture and engineering practices. This hands-on role demands deep distributed-systems expertise and leadership across teams to deliver scalable cloud orchestration with reliability and compliance.

You will shape APIs, persistence models, and workflows while advancing automation and observability.

Qualifications

• Experience designing, building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production cloud environments.
• Deep understanding of cloud platform architecture, orchestration systems, APIs, resiliency, observability and safety.
• Strong programming skills in Java, Python, Go, TypeScript, or similar languages.
• Experience leading cross-functional technical initiatives and guiding architecture across teams.
• Strong fundamentals in testing, code quality, design patterns, and maintainability.
• Experience with databases, distributed systems, API design and production debugging.
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted software engineering and automation.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture, design and implementation of Shepherd platform capabilities for release orchestration and safety.
• Design and build highly available distributed systems across multi-region environments.
• Drive long-term platform architecture including APIs, persistence, workflows and resiliency.
• Partner with engineering, SRE, security, compliance, and OCI service teams on cross-organizational initiatives.
• Establish engineering standards for code quality, testing, documentation, observability and readiness.
• Provide technical leadership via architecture reviews, design docs, production-ready code and mentoring.
• Develop automation and AI-assisted workflows to improve developer productivity while ensuring reliability.
• Continuously improve platform reliability and operational excellence.

Skills

Distributed systems

Cloud architecture

APIs

Resiliency

Observability

Operational safety

Java

Job description

Job Description Shepherd is OCI's cloud-scale release orchestration platform, enabling the safe and reliable deployment of software, infrastructure, and configuration changes across regions, realms, and critical cloud services. As OCI continues to expand into sovereign, regulated, and large-scale deployment environments, Shepherd is evolving into a resilient orchestration control plane for cloud-scale change.

Job Description Shepherd is OCI's cloud-scale release orchestration platform, enabling the safe and reliable deployment of software, infrastructure, and configuration changes across regions, realms, and critical cloud services. As OCI continues to expand into sovereign, regulated, and large-scale deployment environments, Shepherd is evolving into a resilient orchestration control plane for cloud-scale change. We are seeking a Lead Principal Platform Software Engineer to lead the evolution of Shepherd's architecture and engineering practices. This hands-on technical leadership role requires deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud platform architecture, deployment orchestration, and operational excellence. The successful candidate will drive architectural direction, deliver foundational software, lead complex cross-team initiatives, and establish engineering standards that improve reliability, maintainability, and developer productivity.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture, design, and implementation of Shepherd platform capabilities for release orchestration, deployment safety, rollback automation, dependency modeling, and operational workflows.
• Design and build highly available distributed systems that operate reliably across cloud-scale, multi-region, and partially connected environments.
• Drive long-term platform architecture, including APIs, service boundaries, persistence models, workflow execution, resiliency, compatibility, and extensibility.
• Partner across engineering, SRE, security, compliance, infrastructure, and OCI service teams to deliver cross-organizational technical initiatives.
• Establish engineering standards for code quality, testing, documentation, observability, operational readiness, and maintainability.
• Provide technical leadership through architecture reviews, design documents, production-ready code, mentoring, and incident investigations.
• Develop automation and AI-assisted engineering workflows that improve developer productivity while maintaining production quality, security, and reliability.
• Continuously improve platform reliability, deployment safety, operational efficiency, and engineering excellence.

Required Qualifications

• Strong experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems in production cloud environments.
• Deep understanding of cloud platform architecture, orchestration systems, APIs, resiliency, observability, and operational safety.
• Strong programming skills in Java, Python, Go, TypeScript, or similar languages.
• Experience leading complex cross-functional technical initiatives and influencing architecture across teams.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals including testing, code quality, design patterns, and maintainability.
• Experience with databases, distributed systems, API design, and production debugging.
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted software engineering and engineering automation.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, technical leadership, and mentoring skills.

Preferred Experience

• Experience with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) or another hyperscale cloud platform.
• Experience with deployment orchestration, release automation, cloud control planes, or internal developer platforms.
• Experience with compliance-sensitive or sovereign cloud environments.
• Experience defining engineering standards, SLOs, rollout policies, and observability frameworks.
• Experience developing reusable platform libraries, automation frameworks, and reference implementations.

Qualifications

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: $135,200 - $306,400 per year. 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.

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

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, including expert medical opinion
• Short term disability and long term disability
• Life insurance and AD&D
• Supplemental life insurance (Employee/Spouse/Child)
• Health care and dependent care Flexible Spending Accounts
• Pre-tax commuter and parking benefits
• 401(k) Savings and Investment Plan with company match
• 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.
• 11 paid holidays
• 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.
• Paid parental leave
• Adoption assistance
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Financial planning and group legal
• 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

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