Lead Principal Core Infrastructure Engineer

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is expanding across existing and new regions. Our Networking organization builds systems that manage Internet and backbone traffic, mitigate congestion, and reduce customer impact while enabling network operations to scale efficiently.

The Lead Principal Core Infrastructure Engineer mentors engineering teams and leads the architecture of highly scalable, interdependent distributed systems. This role identifies and eliminates performance and scalability bottlenecks for hyperscale workloads, defines scalability requirements with stakeholders, and designs elastic, high-impact systems while driving innovation in data plane platforms.

We are seeking a Lead Principal Core Infrastructure Engineer to define technical direction and lead the development of highly available, scalable network control, intelligent routing and automation systems. You will combine deep networking knowledge with software and distributed systems expertise to connect real-time observability with safe, automated routing decisions.

Your work will span autonomous traffic management, policy-driven network optimization, and software-based routing infrastructure. You will identify performance and scalability bottlenecks, define requirements with stakeholders, and design resilient services that protect customer connectivity during growth, failures, and infrastructure changes.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role with broad architectural influence. Based in IDC alongside the engineering team, you will lead initiatives from design through production operations, contribute to critical implementations, and establish standards for availability, security, observability, and safe deployment. You will collaborate across engineering and operations teams while mentoring senior engineers and developing technical leadership.

Responsibilities

• Define technical strategy and architecture for scalable routing, network control, and automation systems.

• Design algorithms and distributed services for route computation, congestion management, traffic steering, fault isolation, and recovery.

• Correlate network and infrastructure signals to assess customer impact and enable safe automated responses.

• Identify performance bottlenecks and optimize capacity, resource utilization, routing convergence, and behavior under heavy load.

• Architect and build highly available, fault-tolerant systems with reliable state management, replication, automated failover, and recovery.

• Define service-level objectives, operational KPIs, telemetry, monitoring, and alerting for service health and routing outcomes.

• Establish simulation, scale testing, phased migrations, in-service upgrades, verification, and rollback practices.

• Lead production troubleshooting, incident response, and root-cause analysis; establish runbooks and drive reliability improvements.

• Integrate security controls, auditability, infrastructure as code, and automated deployment, patching, and lifecycle management.

• Contribute production-quality code, review designs and implementations, and maintain architecture and operational documentation.

• Partner with cross-functional engineering, product, and business stakeholders to define technical strategy and deliver high-impact initiatives.

• Mentor senior engineers, influence architectural direction, and promote engineering excellence through technical leadership, hiring, and knowledge sharing.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

• 10+ years of relevant experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, network control planes, or network automation platforms.

• Strong Linux systems and networking knowledge, including containers, process and memory behavior, network namespaces, resource isolation, and packet-level troubleshooting.

• Experience designing highly available distributed services with reliable state management, observability, overload protection, and failure recovery.

• Demonstrated ability to lead architecture and delivery across teams, resolve ambiguous requirements, communicate technical trade-offs, and mentor senior engineers.

• Deep knowledge of L2/L3 networking, routing and switching, software-defined networking, traffic engineering, and WAN technologies.

• Strong expertise in BGP and MP-BGP, IPv4/IPv6, route reflection, routing policy, and VPN address families, including practical experience with convergence and reachability troubleshooting.

• Strong programming skills in one or more languages such as Go, Python, Java, or C++, with experience in API design, concurrency, automated testing, and production debugging.

Preferred Qualifications

• Production expertise with Junos and Juniper cRPD or comparable virtualized routing platforms.

• Experience with BGP Add-Path, Optimal Route Reflection (ORR), Prefix Independent Convergence (BGP-PIC), route-flap damping, and large-scale routing tables.

• Knowledge of MPLS, RSVP-TE, PCEP, bandwidth reservation, latency-aware routing, and shared-risk link groups.

• Experience with NETCONF, Junos XML APIs, gRPC, OpenConfig, and model-driven network automation.

• Experience tuning containerized networking workloads, including cgroups, socket buffers, veth, and SR-IOV.

• Experience with infrastructure as code, automated lifecycle orchestration, and rolling upgrades for stateful services.

• Understanding of Clos fabrics, overlay/underlay integration, ECMP behavior, and backbone transit.

• Experience building distributed active measurement and telemetry systems.

• Experience with simulation, failure injection, or formal methods to validate complex distributed-system behavior.

• Experience applying traffic prediction, machine learning, or AI techniques to network optimization, anomaly detection, or operational intelligence.