Lead Principal Site Reliability Engineer
About the job
- Extensive professional experience in site reliability engineering, software engineering, cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, systems engineering, or a related technical discipline.
- Demonstrated experience designing, operating, and improving highly available production systems at significant scale.
- Deep knowledge of distributed systems, cloud architecture, networking, operating systems, storage, databases, and service dependencies.
- Advanced experience with at least one major cloud platform, such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.
- Strong experience with containerization and orchestration technologies, including Docker and Kubernetes.
- Proven expertise with infrastructure-as-code and configuration-management technologies such as Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or equivalent tools.
- Experience implementing observability solutions using metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and automated alerting.
- Strong programming or scripting skills in one or more languages such as Python, Go, Java, JavaScript, Bash, or similar.
- Experience with continuous integration, continuous delivery, automated testing, and modern release-management practices.
- Demonstrated leadership during critical production incidents and complex technical investigations.
- Ability to diagnose difficult system issues across applications, infrastructure, networks, databases, and cloud services.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical risk and recommendations to engineering leaders and business stakeholders.
- Proven ability to lead cross-functional technical initiatives without relying solely on formal authority.
- Define and drive the site reliability engineering strategy for large-scale, distributed, and business-critical platforms.
- Establish reliability standards, engineering practices, and operational readiness requirements across multiple teams.
- Serve as a senior technical authority for system reliability, scalability, resilience, performance, and production operations.
- Influence architecture and design decisions to ensure systems are supportable, observable, fault tolerant, and capable of meeting availability objectives.
- Identify systemic reliability risks and lead cross-functional initiatives to address them.
- Provide technical direction and mentorship to site reliability engineers, software engineers, platform engineers, and operations teams.
- Lead technical reviews and promote consistent engineering practices across the organization.
- Define and implement service-level indicators, service-level objectives, error budgets, and operational health metrics.
- Develop comprehensive monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, and observability strategies.
- Improve the quality and actionability of alerts while reducing unnecessary operational noise.
- Establish dashboards and reporting mechanisms that clearly communicate service health, performance, capacity, and risk.
- Use production data and reliability trends to prioritize engineering investments and continuous-improvement initiatives.
- Design and implement automation that reduces manual intervention, operational toil, and human error.
- Build or enhance tools for deployment, configuration management, infrastructure provisioning, incident response, and service recovery.
- Promote infrastructure-as-code, policy-as-code, automated testing, and repeatable deployment practices.
- Partner with development teams to improve continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines.
- Develop self-healing and automated remediation capabilities where appropriate.
- Contribute production-quality software and reusable platform components using modern programming and scripting languages.
- Provide technical leadership during complex, high-severity production incidents.
- Coordinate diagnosis, containment, recovery, and stakeholder communication during service disruptions.
- Lead blameless post-incident reviews and ensure that corrective actions address root causes rather than symptoms.
- Identify recurring failure patterns and develop long-term engineering solutions.
- Improve incident-management processes, escalation procedures, runbooks, and recovery playbooks.
- Participate in an on-call rotation or provide senior escalation support for critical services, as required.
- Lead capacity planning, performance analysis, load testing, and demand forecasting for critical platforms.
- Identify performance bottlenecks and recommend architectural or operational improvements.
- Design and validate high-availability, disaster-recovery, backup, and business-continuity capabilities.
- Lead resilience testing, failure-mode analysis, game days, and controlled fault-injection exercises.
- Ensure recovery-time and recovery-point objectives are defined, tested, and achievable.
- Partner with security and compliance teams to embed security into infrastructure, automation, and operational practices.
- Support vulnerability remediation, access-control improvements, audit readiness, and secure configuration management.
- Ensure production environments meet organizational standards for change management, data protection, and operational governance.
- Balance reliability, security, delivery speed, cost, and business priorities when recommending technical solutions.
- Experience supporting enterprise-scale cloud services, software-as-a-service platforms, or other high-availability customer-facing systems.
- Experience defining and operating service-level objectives, error budgets, and reliability scorecards.
- Knowledge of chaos engineering, resilience testing, and automated recovery techniques.
- Experience with multi-region, hybrid-cloud, or multi-cloud architectures.
- Familiarity with security frameworks, compliance requirements, and regulated operating environments.
- Experience improving cloud cost efficiency, capacity utilization, or infrastructure performance.
- Contributions to internal engineering standards, technical communities, open-source projects, or industry publications.
- Bachelor’s or advanced degree in computer science, engineering, information systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
About the company
Oracle builds databases, business applications, and cloud infrastructure for companies and public-sector organizations. Oracle Database stores and processes business data, while Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides computing, storage, and networking for applications and AI workloads. Fusion Cloud Applications support finance, human resources, supply chains, and customer service, helping businesses manage everyday operations and reporting. Customers pay for cloud subscriptions and usage, software licenses, support, hardware, and consulting, with deployment options in Oracle's cloud or their own data centers. Oracle was founded in 1977 and is headquartered in Austin, Texas.
Company Size
10,001+
Company Stage
IPO
Headquarters
Austin, Texas
Founded
1977
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Cloud infrastructure sales grew: Oracle reported $7.4 billion quarterly revenue, up 121% yearly, in September 2026.
- Employees build transferable skills: Oracle offers free product certifications and access to Coursera, O'Reilly, and LinkedIn Learning.
- Existing licenses create repeat business: Oracle sells annual technical support covering software updates, fixes, and assistance.
What critics are saying
- Expansion consumes cash: Oracle reported negative $5 billion free cash flow for its August 2026 quarter despite profitable operations.
- Job security faces active restructuring: Oracle's September 2026 filing added $700 million to a plan centered on employee severance.
- Future datacenters lock in costs: Oracle's September 2026 filing lists $288 billion of future lease commitments, typically lasting 15-19 years.
What makes Oracle unique
- Its database runs inside rival clouds: Oracle delivers native database services in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud datacenters.
- Global expansion keeps one rate card: Oracle charges the same OCI service prices across regions, including government clouds.
- Hardware participates in database work: Oracle's Exadata storage servers process data-intensive queries alongside specialized database servers and networking.
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Benefits
401(k) Savings and Investment Plan with company match
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.
11 paid holidays
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.
Paid parental leave
Adoption assistance
Employee Stock Purchase Plan
Financial planning and group legal
Voluntary benefits including auto, homeowner and pet insurance
Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
2%1 year growth
2%2 year growth
3%Oracle has urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to speed up approval of the 17.8-mile Green Chile pipeline in New Mexico. It says delays threaten its Project Jupiter data center campus. The pipeline would carry about 400 million cubic feet of natural gas a day to power the site's microgrid, which uses Bloom Energy fuel cells. Its start date has slipped to February 2027 from August, after local opposition forced developer Transwestern Pipeline Co. to move the route onto federal land. Environmental groups and New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez want FERC to review the data center and pipeline together. Oracle has considered trucking in gas for early commissioning work. In a letter to FERC on Tuesday, Oracle said the four-building campus would support nearly 5,800 peak construction jobs and generate up to $1.1 billion in annual economic output for Doña Ana County.
A Motley Fool analysis picks Oracle over Intuit as the better tech stock to buy in 2026, though it flags risks at both companies. Intuit posted fiscal 2026 revenue of $21 billion, up about 14%, with net income near $4.6 billion and free cash flow of $8.6 billion. It trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 13.1x, against 17.4x for Oracle. The author warns it could be a value trap as cheaper tax tools threaten its individual customer base. Oracle reported revenue of about $67 billion, up 17%, and net income of $17 billion. Free cash flow was negative at nearly $5.4 billion. Its debt-to-equity ratio fell from 3.6x in May to 2.3x in August. The author favours Oracle for its cloud backlog and 30% revenue growth last quarter.
PowerPlan, a financial software provider for asset-intensive companies, has launched an Enterprise Adapter for Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP. The Atlanta company announced the product on October 13, 2026. The adapter gives customers a standard, supported way to bring Oracle financial and project data into PowerPlan's Project and Asset Accounting solution. It replaces the custom integrations many teams now maintain themselves, which grow costly as cloud software updates frequently. "We support the connection and maintain it as both platforms evolve, so our customer teams don't have to," said Todd Bransford, chief product officer at PowerPlan. The adapter is available now. It is part of PowerPlan's growing suite of Enterprise Adapters.
Simply Wall St has highlighted three founder-led US stocks for investors who want company leaders with a stake in the outcome. The picks come from a screener that surfaces 25 more such businesses. Credo Technology Group Holding makes high-speed connectivity chips and cables. It earns about $1.6 billion from semiconductors and has a market value near $40.7 billion. Its DustPhotonics acquisition pushes it into longer-range, higher-bandwidth products. Oracle, shaped by Larry Ellison's ownership, draws most of its $71.8 billion revenue from cloud and software. Its market value is near $428.7 billion. Nu Holdings, co-founded by David Vélez, has $8.4 billion in banking revenue and a market value of about $77.9 billion. Brazil's central bank will require it to obtain a full banking licence by 2026.
Oracle and Cisco are both positioned to benefit from growing AI infrastructure demand, though through different approaches. Oracle focuses on cloud computing power through its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, while Cisco concentrates on networking and security, including its Secure AI Factory partnership with Nvidia. Oracle reported annual sales of $67.36 billion and net income of $17.09 billion, outpacing Cisco's $63.33 billion in sales and $13.27 billion in profit. Oracle trades at 22 times forward earnings versus Cisco's 27 times. Both companies offer a 1.4% dividend yield. However, Oracle's payout ratio stands at 29%, compared with Cisco's 45%, providing more reinvestment flexibility. Cisco has delivered stronger stock performance with 112% returns over five years, more than double Oracle's 51%. Analysts rate Oracle a "Strong Buy" and Cisco a "Moderate Buy".