Principal Systems Engineer

About the Group:
At Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), we build the future of the cloud for Enterprises as a diverse team of fellow creators and inventors. We act with the speed and attitude of a start-up, with the scale and customer-focus of the leading enterprise software company in the world. AI2 Oerations is one of the core organisations within OCI. We are responsible for providing BM Compute power.
The AI2 Operations org comprises of a family of critical foundational infrastructure services that drive OCI’s hardware lifecycle activities
Work with product team on the shared full stack ownership of a collection of services and/or technology areas. Understand the end-to-end configuration, technical dependencies, and overall behavioural characteristics of production services. Responsible for the mitigating critical customer incidents, or deployments or testing required to improve security, performance, availability, and scalability of service. Authority for end-to-end performance and operability. Partner with development teams in meeting SLA to unblock customers. Articulate technical characteristics of services and technology areas and guide Development Teams to engineer and add premier capabilities to the Oracle Cloud service portfolio. Understand and communicate the scale, capacity, security, performance attributes, and requirements of the service and technology stack. Demonstrate clear understanding of automation and orchestration principles. Act as ultimate escalation point for complex or critical issues that have not yet been documented as Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). Utilise a deep understanding of service topology and their dependencies required to troubleshoot issues and define mitigations. Understand and explain the effect of product architecture decisions on distributed systems. Professional curiosity and a desire to a develop deep understanding of services and technologies.
Responsible for the operation of production environments, including systems, supporting critical business operations. Will perform administration and analysis for multiple production environments and recommend new and novel solutions to improve availability, performance, and supportability. This is an opportunity to bring a combination of deep technical knowledge with administration/analysis knowledge of Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure to provide support to a wide range of complex production environment problems related to immense growth, scaling, leveraging the cloud, extremely high performance, and high availability requirements.
Qualifications / Experience:
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
8+ years of experience in infrastructure engineering, cloud operations, site reliability engineering, production operations, or a related technical discipline.
Expert-level Linux administration skills, particularly with Ubuntu and Oracle Linux in large-scale production environments.
Proven ability to troubleshoot complex infrastructure issues across hardware, operating systems, networking, drivers, firmware, and service dependencies.
Strong understanding of distributed systems and how compute, networking, storage, and application services interact to affect reliability and customer experience.
Hands-on experience with automation, scripting, and configuration management using tools such as Python, shell scripting, Ansible, and Terraform.
Strong knowledge of incident management, service management, root cause analysis, and operational improvement.
Experience with infrastructure provisioning, configuration, monitoring, maintenance, and host lifecycle management.
Solid understanding of the OSI model, TCP/IP, HTTP, and structured troubleshooting across multiple infrastructure layers.
Demonstrated ability to serve as a senior technical escalation point and independently drive complex issues to resolution.
Demonstrated success using operational metrics—such as mean time to restore service (MTTR), ticket age, incident volume, recurring issue rates, automation coverage, and service level performance—to drive measurable improvements.
Strong planning and organizational skills, including prioritizing work, managing dependencies, tracking execution, and assessing operational risks.
Clear written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain technical issues, customer impact, risks, and recommendations to technical and business stakeholders.
Infrastructure/Networking:
Operate and improve Linux-based compute infrastructure to support reliable, scalable AI, GPU, and inference workloads.
Apply strong networking knowledge across TCP/IP, IPv4/IPv6, DNS, DHCP, VPNs, and SSL/TLS to diagnose connectivity and service issues.
Troubleshoot communication failures between hosts, nodes, and distributed services, identifying dependencies and potential points of failure.
Use Ansible, Terraform, Python, and shell scripting to standardize infrastructure configuration and automate operational tasks.
Support datacentre operations, including host provisioning, maintenance, hardware troubleshooting, repair coordination, and decommissioning.
Collaborate with infrastructure and networking teams to improve availability, capacity, configuration consistency, and operational readiness.
Incident Management:
Lead the technical response and coordination of critical infrastructure incidents, from initial triage through service restoration, recovery validation, and handoff.
Assess customer and workload impact, clearly distinguishing confirmed issues from symptoms still under investigation.
Coordinate across the Network Operations Centre (NOC), networking, datacentre operations, GPU and interconnect engineering, hardware repair, and service delivery teams to drive timely resolution.
Provide calm, clear communication during high-severity incidents, keeping customers and stakeholders informed of impact, progress, risks, and next steps.
Maintain accurate incident records, including timelines, accountable owners, mitigation actions, decisions, and escalation paths.