Principal Engineer, Core Infrastructure

Oracle Corporation; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Oracle Corporation seeks a Principal Member of Technical Staff to help shape Lightweight Infrastructure for Autonomous OCI. You will lead design and delivery of scalable, resilient cloud services, define KPIs, and mentor teams as you drive platform automation.

The role emphasizes architecture, security, and observability across compute, storage, networking, and governance within OCI.

Qualifications

• BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
• 6–10+ years of software engineering experience building highly available, scalable distributed systems or cloud infrastructure.
• Strong programming skills in Java, Go, Rust, C/C++, or a similar systems/backend language.
• Deep experience in core infrastructure areas: distributed systems, cloud control planes, scheduling, virtualization, storage, networking, security, reliability, or platform automation.
• Ability to independently lead design and delivery of complex, resilient services.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and delivery of complex services that are correct, resilient, observable, and operable.
• Define scalability requirements and optimize code/data paths for high-throughput workloads.
• Architect components of scalable distributed systems and ensure robust security controls.
• Mentor peers, participate in design/code reviews, and drive operational readiness with telemetry and dashboards.

Skills

Distributed systems

Cloud infrastructure

Technical leadership

Debugging

Collaboration

Mentorship

Java, Go, Rust, C/C++

Education

BS/MS in Computer Science

Job description

Within OCI, the Technical Strategy & Oversight organization builds foundational systems for OCI’s most demanding services. One of its boldest initiatives is Autonomous OCI: a greenfield effort to build a cloud platform that can operate and scale with far less manual work.

Today, every new region and service feature adds operational cost and complexity. Autonomous OCI is designed to change that by making services fast, resilient, and self-healing by default—helping OCI scale to thousands of regions without growing operations teams at the same rate.

As a Principal Member of Technical Staff, you will help shape Lightweight Infrastructure (LWI), the next-generation runtime and platform layer for compute, storage, networking, identity, observability, and governance.

Qualifications

• BS/MS in Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience.
• 6–10+ years of software engineering experience building highly available, scalable distributed systems or cloud infrastructure.
• Strong programming skills in Java, Go, Rust, C/C++, or a similar systems or backend language.
• Deep experience in one or more core infrastructure areas: distributed systems, cloud control planes, management planes, scheduling, virtualization, storage, networking, security, reliability, or platform automation.
• Ability to independently lead the design and delivery of complex services that must be correct, resilient, observable, and easy to operate.
• Strong understanding of failure handling, concurrency, asynchronous workflows, safe retries, and lifecycle management in distributed systems.
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills, including the ability to drive resolution for complex production and performance issues.
• Experience collaborating across teams and turning broad platform goals into clear designs and executable plans.
• Ability to raise the technical bar through mentoring, design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on technical leadership.

Leads development and begins architecting components of scalable, elastic distributed systems. Defines and enforces scalability requirements for owned components; optimizes code and data paths for high‑throughput, hyper‑scale workloads; and leverages data plane platforms for large‑scale retrieval, storage, and processing. Designs fault‑tolerant, in‑service‑upgradable systems using redundancy, replication, failover, and policies for partitions, applying load‑shedding, throttling, and rate‑limiting to handle network unreliability while meeting SLOs. Establishes KPIs and telemetry; builds proactive dashboards and alerts; and designs complex validation (fault injection, brownouts), replication, and synchronization for correctness and durability. Proactively diagnoses and resolves production issues, mentors peers, and ensures operational readiness. Implements robust security controls, executes remediation, maintains compliance documentation, and develops IaC and automation that enable safe patching, updates, and rollbacks within change‑management plans.