Principal Core Infrastructure Engineer

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) team offers the opportunity to build and operate a suite of massive-scale, coordinated cloud services in a broadly distributed, multi-tenant cloud environment. OCI is committed to delivering cloud products that meet the needs of customers tackling some of the world’s biggest challenges.

OCI Infrastructure Delivery Engineering is a growing organization responsible for building services and tools that accelerate how OCI expands its compute and network capacity. Our platform supports the full lifecycle of data centers and their physical assets-from planning and design, through delivery and operation, to eventual decommissioning. It enables OCI to grow efficiently in existing regions and launch entirely new regions while meeting the high-capacity needs of large and hyperscale customers.

We are seeking a hands-on Principal Software Development Engineer to provide technical leadership for this greenfield platform. You will define architecture and engineering strategy for highly available, scalable services that manage physical assets throughout their lifecycle. You will solve ambiguous, cross-organizational problems; establish durable technical patterns; and raise the engineering bar while remaining deeply engaged in design, implementation, operational excellence, and customer outcomes.

This role combines broad autonomy with the opportunity to integrate with existing OCI systems through well-established contracts. You will influence the direction of a foundational platform at cloud scale and help shape how OCI continues to grow its global footprint.

About You

• You are a hands-on cloud engineer and technical leader with a record of delivering high-scale, high-impact distributed systems.

• You turn ambiguous business and infrastructure problems into clear technical strategy, phased execution plans, and measurable outcomes.

• You care deeply about customers and consistently make sound trade-offs among reliability, security, velocity, simplicity, and cost.

• You communicate complex technical concepts clearly to engineers, product leaders, and partner teams.

• You set a high engineering bar, use data to build consensus, and constructively challenge assumptions.

• You thrive in a fast-moving environment, take ownership across organizational boundaries, and mentor engineers at multiple levels.

Minimum Qualifications

• BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 10+ years of professional software development experience, including substantial experience designing, shipping, and operating scalable, cloud-native distributed systems.

• Demonstrated technical leadership for complex, multi-service initiatives, including architecture definition, technical roadmaps, design reviews, and delivery across multiple teams.

• Strong proficiency in one or more high-level programming languages, preferably Go and/or Java; proficiency with scripting or automation languages such as Python.

• Deep experience with distributed-systems fundamentals, microservice design patterns, service-to-service communication, data consistency, fault tolerance, and highly available service design.

• Experience designing production services with robust observability, including service-level indicators/objectives, dashboards, metrics, alarms, capacity planning, and operational runbooks.

• Proven production-operations experience, including incident response, root-cause analysis, on-call practices, and driving systemic reliability improvements.

• Strong foundation in computer science concepts, including data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and programming paradigms.

• Ability to author and communicate technical proposals, architecture documents, design specifications, and presentations for diverse audiences.

• Experience mentoring engineers and improving engineering practices through code reviews, design reviews, and technical guidance.

Preferred Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

• Experience building control-plane and/or data-plane solutions for a cloud provider or other large-scale infrastructure company.

• Experience with the physical asset lifecycle in cloud-scale data centers, including planning, delivery, inventory, deployment, maintenance, and decommissioning.

• Experience with Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) systems, capacity-planning tools, or physical infrastructure workflows.

• Experience with Kubernetes, container orchestration, and modern infrastructure components such as service discovery, secret storage, containerization, and software-defined networking.

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code, preferably Terraform.

• Experience diagnosing and resolving complex performance, scaling, and reliability issues in large distributed environments.

• Track record of establishing technical standards, reusable platform capabilities, or engineering practices adopted across teams.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the technical architecture for services and tools that accelerate OCI compute and network capacity growth.

• Lead the design and delivery of resilient, scalable, secure, and operable services for the end-to-end physical asset lifecycle.

• Translate long-term business and infrastructure goals into technical strategy, architecture roadmaps, and sequenced execution plans.

• Remain hands-on: prototype critical paths, review code and designs, solve difficult technical problems, and guide implementation of high-risk components.

• Drive alignment across engineering, product, operations, security, and partner organizations; establish clear interfaces and durable integration contracts.

• Define and champion operational-excellence standards, including observability, service health, incident learning, capacity planning, and reliability goals.

• Identify systemic risks, technical debt, and scaling bottlenecks; prioritize improvements using customer impact and data-driven analysis.

• Raise the technical bar through architectural reviews, engineering standards, technical mentorship, and constructive feedback.

• Influence major decisions for new and existing products, build consensus around trade-offs, and communicate decisions clearly to stakeholders.

• Foster a culture of ownership, continuous learning, simplicity, and iterative delivery while balancing speed with quality.