Principal Engineer - Core Infrastructure

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) delivers mission-critical applications for enterprises around the world. OCI is expanding across public cloud, dedicated cloud, hybrid, multi-cloud, and edge deployments.

Within OCI, the Technical Strategy & Oversight organization builds foundational systems for OCI’s most demanding services. One of its boldest initiatives is Autonomous OCI: a greenfield effort to build a cloud platform that can operate and scale with far less manual work.

Today, every new region and service feature adds operational cost and complexity. Autonomous OCI is designed to change that by making services fast, resilient, and self-healing by default—helping OCI scale to thousands of regions without growing operations teams at the same rate.

As a Principal Member of Technical Staff, you will help shape Lightweight Infrastructure (LWI), the next-generation runtime and platform layer for compute, storage, networking, identity, observability, and governance.

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 will do

• Lead the design and delivery of core distributed systems and cloud-platform capabilities.
• Drive complex technical work from design through implementation, rollout, and operational readiness.
• Work closely with architects and partner teams to improve the scale, resilience, performance, and simplicity of OCI services running on LWI.
• Solve difficult problems involving distributed state, failures, performance, security, lifecycle management, and automation.
• Raise the technical bar through design reviews, code reviews, mentoring, hiring, and hands-on technical leadership.
• Help define the engineering principles and long-term architecture of OCI’s next-generation service platform.

Where you can make an impact

Depending on your background and interests, you may work in one of the following LWI pillars:

• Compute: Build OCI’s next-generation multi-tenant compute platform, working across Rust, virtualization, QEMU, performance, and heterogeneous hardware.
• State: Build the storage layer for LWI—from fast temporary storage to durable volumes—and help shape the path toward serverless PostgreSQL on OCI.
• Identity & Security: Build hardware-rooted workload identity and security for multi-tenant cloud infrastructure, using PKI, confidential computing, enclaves, and attestation.
• Connectivity: Build the secure networking layer for LWI, including ingress, egress, eBPF-based firewalling, and high-performance internal load balancing.
• Stack Lifecycle and Infrastructure Management: Build the lifecycle and operations platform that deploys, upgrades, monitors, recovers, and securely images the entire LWI stack across OCI regions.
• Controllers: Build the Borg-style orchestration and management layer that schedules workloads, manages their lifecycle, and keeps OCI services running reliably at scale.

Qualifications

• BS/MS in Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience.
• 6–10+ years of software engineering experience building highly available, scalable distributed systems or cloud infrastructure.
• Strong programming skills in Java, Go, Rust, C/C++, or a similar systems or backend language.
• Deep experience in one or more core infrastructure areas: distributed systems, cloud control planes, management planes, scheduling, virtualization, storage, networking, security, reliability, or platform automation.
• Ability to independently lead the design and delivery of complex services that must be correct, resilient, observable, and easy to operate.
• Strong understanding of failure handling, concurrency, asynchronous workflows, safe retries, and lifecycle management in distributed systems.
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills, including the ability to drive resolution for complex production and performance issues.
• Experience collaborating across teams and turning broad platform goals into clear designs and executable plans.
• Ability to raise the technical bar through mentoring, design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on technical leadership.

Nice to have

• Experience building cloud platforms on OCI, AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Experience with large-scale orchestration systems, schedulers, Kubernetes controllers, or Borg-style workload-management problems.
• Experience with Rust and systems programming, QEMU and virtualization, eBPF and Linux networking, distributed storage, PKI and confidential computing, image pipelines and software supply chain, fleet lifecycle management, or automated remediation.
• Experience working on multi-tenant workloads, high availability, zero-downtime changes, or global infrastructure.