Principal Software Engineer, Core Infrastructure

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) delivers mission-critical applications for leading enterprises worldwide. Our cloud offers hyperscale, multi-tenant services deployed across more than 50 regions globally. OCI continues to expand beyond traditional public-cloud boundaries to support dedicated, hybrid, and multicloud solutions, edge computing, and more.
As a Principal Core Infrastructure Engineer, you will lead the design and evolution of foundational distributed systems behind OCI. You will build highly scalable, elastic, and fault-tolerant services for high-volume data retrieval, storage, and processing, and set the technical direction for their reliability, correctness, security, and operational readiness.
This position is office-based and requires onsite presence in Nashville, Tennessee. Relocation assistance may be available in accordance with Oracle's relocation policies.
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: $114,600 to $234,600 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 - IC4
What You'll Do
Lead the design, implementation, and ongoing evolution of core distributed systems and data-plane services at hyperscale.
Define scalability, elasticity, durability, and availability requirements for owned components and ensure designs meet them.
Optimize high-throughput data paths for large-scale retrieval, storage, and processing using distributed state, replication, and synchronization patterns.
Design fault-tolerant systems that support in-service updates through redundancy, automatic failover, and recovery-oriented design.
Apply sound distributed-systems tradeoffs for network partitions and reliability, including load shedding, throttling, rate limiting, retries, and timeouts.
Establish service-level objectives, key performance indicators, telemetry, dashboards, and proactive alerting for critical systems.
Design and lead performance, load, fault-injection, and brownout testing to validate correctness, resilience, and operational readiness.
Lead production incident diagnosis and recovery, guide root-cause analysis, and mentor engineers in operational excellence.
Build and improve Infrastructure as Code and operational automation that enable safe patching, updates, rollbacks, and change management.
Apply robust security controls and remediation practices for multi-tenant cloud infrastructure, including encryption, access controls, and compliance readiness.
What You'll Bring
Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
7+ years of professional software-engineering experience, with demonstrated impact on large-scale distributed systems or cloud infrastructure.
Strong experience designing and operating highly available, scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems.
Proficiency in one or more object-oriented or systems programming languages, such as Java, C++, C#, or Go.
Deep understanding of distributed-systems design, data structures, algorithms, operating systems, networking, and secure software-development practices.
Experience with system-level test automation, performance/load testing, reliability engineering, and production incident response.
Demonstrated experience leading or influencing technical architecture and mentoring engineers.
Strong problem-solving, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
Preferred Qualifications
Experience with Oracle Cloud, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or other large-scale cloud platforms.
Experience with data-plane platforms, distributed storage, microservices, replication, state management, or high-throughput data processing.
Experience defining SLOs, building observability systems, and operating services in a 24x7 production environment.
Experience with Infrastructure as Code, service automation, security controls, and compliance requirements for cloud infrastructure.