O

Oracle

Builds databases, business apps and cloud services

Principal Core Infrastructure Engineer

Full-TimeUpdated
$114.6k - $234.6k/yr+ Bonus + Equity + Compensation deferral
Expert
Bachelor's, Master's, PhD
Nashville, TN, USA+1 moreMore locations: United States
In Person
Software EngineeringSystems Software Engineering

About the job

Requirements
  • 11 years of experience in software development; alternatively, a bachelor's degree in a listed field and 7 years of software development experience, a master's degree and 5 years, or a doctorate and 3 years.
  • 3 years of academic or professional experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, Google, or Oracle Cloud.
  • 5 years of experience working in testing and automation at the system level.
  • 4 years of experience working with large-scale distributed systems.
  • Demonstrated ability to analyze and interpret data to produce actionable business insights.
  • Demonstrated ability to use agile methodologies to drive continuous improvement and product delivery.
  • Demonstrated ability or knowledge of automation, including designing, implementing, and managing automated tools, processes, or systems to streamline operations.
  • Demonstrated knowledge of and adherence to regulatory, legal, and organizational compliance requirements.
  • Demonstrated ability or knowledge of quality assurance, including ensuring adherence to standards and implementing quality control measures.
  • Demonstrated ability or knowledge of scripting languages, including writing and maintaining scripts to improve system efficiency.
  • Demonstrated ability to develop and execute software test plans to validate product quality.
  • Demonstrated ability or knowledge of user experience development, including designing user interfaces and content.
  • Demonstrated ability to conduct in-depth code reviews for software quality assurance.
  • Demonstrated ability to develop embedded systems, balancing hardware and software for performance.
  • Demonstrated ability to provide software effort and complexity estimates for project planning and scheduling.
Responsibilities
  • Design and implement major C and C++ features for OCI’s high-performance virtual networking dataplane, including routing, network address translation, network gateways, and security-policy enforcement.
  • Own complex packet-processing components that support scalable, multi-tenant cloud networking.
  • Improve performance across CPU utilization, memory use, concurrency, latency, throughput, and packet-processing efficiency.
  • Apply and evolve fast dataplane technologies such as DPDK, VirtIO, Linux networking, eBPF/XDP, SR-IOV, SmartNICs, and userspace packet-processing frameworks.
  • Define and execute performance, scale, stress, and load tests; identify bottlenecks and deliver measurable improvements.
  • Lead system-level design and code reviews to ensure performance, correctness, reliability, and maintainability.
  • Design and build fault-tolerant gateway and dataplane components that remain available through host failures, network disruptions, and in-service software updates.
  • Implement resilient patterns including health checks, graceful draining, retries, timeouts, failover, rollback, and recovery.
  • Develop fault-injection, brownout, failure-recovery, and availability tests for critical network paths.
  • Drive safe change management through automated validation, staged rollouts, monitoring, rollback, and recovery procedures.
  • Define and improve metrics, alarms, dashboards, telemetry, canaries, and health checks for dataplane services.
  • Diagnose and resolve complex Linux, networking, performance, and production issues using logs, metrics, traces, packet captures, profilers, and core dumps.
  • Build runbooks, diagnostic tools, and operational automation to reduce incident detection, mitigation, and recovery time.
  • Participate in on-call, lead incident investigations for owned components, and deliver durable corrective actions.
  • Design and implement features that enforce strong tenant isolation, secure traffic handling, and policy enforcement.
  • Partner with security teams to identify, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities and operational risks.
  • Ensure designs, documentation, and operational practices meet applicable security, compliance, and change-management requirements.
  • Build and maintain automation and infrastructure-as-code for service development, deployment, monitoring, and operations.
  • Improve deployment safety through automated testing, pre-production validation, progressive rollout, and rollback guardrails.
  • Own major platforms end to end, including design, implementation, testing, deployment, production validation, and ongoing support.
  • Independently plan and execute complex work, identifying risks, dependencies, and tradeoffs early.
  • Manage priorities across multiple initiatives and communicate progress, decisions, and blockers clearly.
  • Break ambiguous technical problems into deliverable milestones and drive them to completion.
  • Collaborate across networking, control-plane, infrastructure, security, hardware, and operations teams to deliver shared outcomes.
  • Lead technical discussions for owned areas and provide design and code-review feedback.
  • Mentor less-experienced engineers in systems programming, debugging, operational practices, and reliable service ownership.
  • Document technical decisions and contribute to team standards, reusable patterns, and engineering knowledge.
  • Resolve complex cross-layer issues by analyzing systems, networking, and production telemetry.
  • Make tradeoffs among performance, reliability, security, maintainability, and delivery speed.
  • Lead practical improvements to development, testing, deployment, observability, and operational workflows.
  • Stay current with C/C++, cloud networking, Linux, and high-performance dataplane technologies, and share relevant knowledge with the team.

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 Jobs

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

1%

1 year growth

2%

2 year growth

3%
Yahoo Finance
Oct 28th, 2026
Oracle targets $30B free cash flow by fiscal 2029, sending shares up 11%

Oracle expects to generate $30 billion in free cash flow by the fiscal year ending May 2029, chief financial officer Hilary Maxson said at its investor day in Las Vegas. The forecast beat Wall Street expectations, which had pointed to deeply negative cash flow. Oracle shares rose about 11%, their best day since May. The company expects to return to positive cash flow by late fiscal 2028. It will cap additional funding through fiscal 2030 at $20 billion, split evenly between equity and debt. Oracle also reaffirmed a target of $225 billion in revenue by fiscal 2030. It plans to add seven gigawatts of data centre capacity over the next couple of years, taking its total beyond 10 gigawatts by the end of fiscal 2028. Cash flow was negative $23.7 billion in the year to May 2026. The stock is still down about 26% this year.

Yahoo Finance
Oct 28th, 2026
Oracle shares jump 4% as OCI adds Nvidia, Google, Intel and Cerebras chips

Oracle shares rose about 4% on Tuesday after the company announced chip partnerships to expand AI capabilities on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) ahead of its Investor Day. The deals involve Cerebras, Intel, Nvidia, and Google. Oracle plans to offer Cerebras Inference on OCI from 2027, aimed at faster inference for complex AI agents. It also signed a multiyear agreement to deploy Intel Xeon processors across OCI, including planned X14 offerings built on Intel's Diamond Rapids chips. OCI will build multi-gigawatt Superclusters using Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems. It will also be the first hyperscaler outside Google to offer Google's Tensor Processing Units, with TPU 8t for training and TPU 8i for inference expected from 2027.

Yahoo Finance
Oct 28th, 2026
Oracle stock down 54% in a year, but analysts see 84% upside to $240 on $664B backlog

Oracle shares have fallen 54% over the past year, largely on concern about the debt it has taken on to build artificial intelligence (AI) data centres. Wall Street expects a rebound. The median 12-month analyst price target of $240 implies an 84% gain from current levels. Of 45 analysts, 36 rate the stock a buy. Oracle reported a $664 billion backlog in the first quarter of fiscal 2027. Cloud infrastructure revenue rose 121%, up from 93% growth in the prior quarter. The company expects fiscal 2027 revenue to rise 34% to at least $90 billion. Analysts forecast 46% growth to $131.8 billion in fiscal 2028. Oracle trades at 5 times sales, below its five-year average of 6.6.

Yahoo Finance
Oct 27th, 2026
Oracle adds Google TPUs, OpenAI security and Cerebras chips to cloud; shares rise 4%

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) will become the first major cloud provider outside Google to offer Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), starting in early 2027. Oracle shares rose about 4% on Tuesday after it announced partnerships with Google, OpenAI, and Cerebras Systems. Oracle also launched the Oracle AI Security Mesh, powered by OpenAI's cyber models. It combines OpenAI's reasoning systems with Oracle's testing tools and customer data to find code flaws and model fixes under human supervision. Oracle will also add Cerebras' wafer-scale processors to its data centres by the first half of 2027, offering fast inference for AI agents. The stock is down about 32% this year.

CNBC
Oct 27th, 2026
Oracle to embed OpenAI's ChatGPT and Codex across more of its products

Oracle is adding OpenAI's ChatGPT and Codex to its application stack, extending enterprise access to OpenAI tools. The agreement embeds the artificial intelligence (AI) tools in more of Oracle's products.