Principal Software Engineer, Core Infrastructure

As Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) continues its rapid expansion, we are seeking a Principal Software Engineer (IC4) to join our Database and Host Automation team. This team builds the services and host agents that manage database infrastructure at scale, supporting provisioning, lifecycle management, live database migrations, maintenance, recovery, and region bootstrap.
This is a greenfield opportunity to design and build new automation services and secure host execution capabilities from the ground up. Your work will connect durable, fleet-wide orchestration with reliable database and operating system operations on individual hosts, improving availability, consistency, and operational safety while minimizing customer disruption.
You will independently drive complex projects from architecture through production operation, collaborating with database, infrastructure, and security teams. As a technical leader, you will guide design decisions, deliver robust software, mentor engineers, and improve engineering and operational practices across the broader organization.
 

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.

Responsibilities
System Design & Architecture
 

• Design and build scalable, highly available automation services and host agents with typed, versioned APIs that support rolling deployments.

• Develop durable workflows and asynchronous operations with idempotency, safe retries, distributed locking, fencing, and failure recovery, balancing consistency, availability, performance, and security.

Database & Infrastructure Automation
 

• Build reusable automation for database provisioning, migration, maintenance, recovery, inventory management, and coordinated fleet operations.

• Modernize existing tooling through phased migration to reviewed agent operations and workflows, supporting region bootstrap, safe upgrades, and rollback while protecting availability and data integrity.

Operational Excellence
 

• Drive operational readiness through SLOs, metrics, dashboards, alerts, tracing, and runbooks, reducing manual intervention and recurring failures.

• Participate in on-call and serve as a technical escalation point, leading complex incident investigations, root cause analysis, and corrective actions.

Security & Reliability
 

• Implement least-privilege execution, authentication, authorization, and secure communication, with controls for host validation, concurrency, and resource consumption.

• Drive automated testing for correctness, integration, concurrency, performance, and failure recovery while meeting OCI security and engineering standards.

Planning & Execution
 

• Independently own complex initiatives from requirements and design through implementation, validation, deployment, and production operation.

• Translate ambiguous requirements into milestones, manage dependencies and risks, and communicate tradeoffs affecting customers, partner teams, and business goals.

Collaboration & Technical Leadership
 

• Collaborate across teams and lead design and code reviews to deliver integrated, maintainable, and operationally safe solutions.

• Mentor engineers, improve shared components and engineering practices, and support hiring through interviews and technical assessments.

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.
As part of Oracle's onboarding process and consistent with applicable law, US-based employees are required to complete identity verification, which involves the collection and processing of their biometric information. Accommodations to this requirement may be granted following an individualized assessment.