Principal Core Infrastructure Engineer

Provides technical leadership for a set of services within OCI’s network monitoring and observability platform, which provides visibility into the health, performance, and behavior of OCI network infrastructure.

Designs and evolves highly scalable, reliable, and efficient distributed services for collecting, processing, storing, and analyzing network telemetry. Owns service architecture and technical decisions across telemetry ingestion, stream processing, metrics, alerting, andnetwork health monitoring.

Ensures owned services operate reliably at cloud scale, meeting requirements for availability, data integrity, latency, scalability, and operational efficiency. Identifies performance and reliability bottlenecks and drives architectural and engineering improvements.

Serves as a technical expert for owned services, leads resolution of complex production issues, and works closely with network engineering, infrastructure, and dependent service teams. Mentors engineers and contributes to architecture and engineering standards across the broader Network Monitoring organization.

Responsibilities

Network Observability & Service Architecture

• Own the architecture and technical evolution of critical services within OCI’s network observability platform.
• Design distributed services that collect, process, aggregate, store, query, and expose network telemetry at cloud scale.
• Design scalable telemetry ingestion and processing pipelines for high-volume and high-cardinality data.
• Develop capabilities for monitoring network health, topology, state, performance, and device behavior.
• Design solutions that enable timely detection, diagnosis, and isolation of network failures and performance degradation.
• Ensure telemetry quality, completeness, freshness, accuracy, and availability within owned services.

Scalability & Distributed Systems

• Design horizontally scalable and elastic services capable of supporting continued OCI infrastructure and traffic growth.
• Identify and resolve performance, throughput, latency, storage, and scalability bottlenecks.
• Design high-throughput streaming and event-processing systems, including partitioning, buffering, aggregation, backpressure, and failure handling.
• Implement resilient state management, replication, synchronization, and recovery mechanisms.
• Make appropriate engineering trade-offs across consistency, availability, latency, durability, performance, and cost.

Reliability & Operational Excellence

• Define and meet SLOs for availability, durability, latency, data freshness, and correctness of owned services.
• Design fault-tolerant services that operate through infrastructure failures, network disruptions, dependency failures, and software upgrades.
• Define KPIs, telemetry, dashboards, and alerts required to understand service health and identify operational risks.
• Lead diagnosis and resolution of complex production issues involving owned services and their dependencies.
• Lead root-cause investigations and implement corrective actions that prevent recurrence.
• Maintain high standards for operational readiness, capacity planning, deployment, upgrades, rollback, and recovery.
• Participate in operational support and serve as an escalation point for critical issues involving owned services.

Network Monitoring & Analytics

• Build capabilities for monitoring large-scale Layer 2 and Layer 3 network infrastructure.
• Develop mechanisms to identify changes in network state, topology, reachability, performance, and device health.
• Correlate telemetry across network devices and infrastructure services to improve fault detection and localization.
• Develop approaches for identifying abnormal network behavior, telemetry gaps, capacity risks, and infrastructure failures.
• Partner with network engineering teams to translate network behavior and operational requirements into monitoring capabilities.
• Improve alert quality and signal-to-noise ratio to reduce unnecessary operational load.

Software Engineering & Automation

• Design and implement high-quality, maintainable, and performance-sensitive production software.
• Drive engineering practices for testing, code quality, automation, and safe software delivery within owned services.
• Automate infrastructure provisioning, configuration, deployment, patching, upgrades, and rollback.
• Improve service efficiency through performance optimization, capacity management, and reduction of operational toil.
• Ensure security, compliance, and vulnerability remediation requirements are incorporated into service design and operation.

Technical Leadership & Collaboration

• Provide technical leadership for projects and initiatives involving owned services.
• Make and document architectural decisions and influence related designs across dependent services.
• Lead complex technical problems that span service boundaries and coordinate with other teams when required.
• Mentor engineers in distributed systems, networking, observability, reliability, and software engineering.
• Conduct design and code reviews and raise engineering standards within the team.
• Evaluate new technologies and engineering approaches where they improve scalability, reliability, performance, or operational efficiency.
• Contribute to hiring, technical interviews, knowledge sharing, and development of engineering talent.

Skills & Technologies

The candidate should have strong expertise in several of the following areas:

• Distributed Systems & Cloud: Distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, microservices, distributed state management, high availability, fault tolerance, capacity planning, and performance engineering.
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, metrics and telemetry systems, time-series data, high-cardinality metrics, alerting, dashboards, SLOs, and large-scale monitoring systems.
• Streaming & Data Processing: Kafka, Flink or equivalent technologies; stream processing, event-driven systems, partitioning, aggregation, buffering, backpressure, and data pipelines.
• Networking: Strong understanding of L2/L3 networking, routing and switching, BGP, LLDP, SNMP, gNMI, network topology, network failure modes, and troubleshooting.
• Network Telemetry: Experience collecting and processing telemetry from large network environments using streaming telemetry, counters, events, protocol state, and device health information.
• Programming: Strong software engineering skills in Java, Go, or similar languages, including concurrent and performance-sensitive production systems.
• Reliability Engineering: SLOs, availability, durability, failure handling, load shedding, throttling, rate limiting, incident response, RCA, and production readiness.
• Automation: Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, automated deployment and configuration, safe rollout and rollback, and operational automation.
• Security: Secure cloud service design, authentication and authorization, encryption, vulnerability remediation, and protection of infrastructure telemetry.

Experience building and operating large-scale cloud infrastructure, network monitoring, telemetry, or observability services is strongly preferred.

Career Level - IC4