Principal Software Engineer

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) builds and operates cloud services that help customers solve complex technical and business challenges. OCI Queue provides managed, durable messaging that enables applications to communicate asynchronously, absorb traffic spikes, and process work reliably.

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer who enjoys building distributed systems and solving challenging problems in messaging, storage, concurrency, and production reliability. You will help shape OCI Queue’s architecture and develop capabilities that balance durability, correctness, performance, scalability, and operational simplicity.

You will work across customer-facing APIs, queue management workflows, request routing, and replicated storage. This is a hands-on technical leadership role with ownership from design and implementation through testing, deployment, and production operations.

In this role, you will:

• Lead the design and implementation of distributed messaging capabilities, including ordered delivery, deduplication, message lifecycle management, and workload isolation.
• Improve service performance, capacity utilization, availability, and recovery under failures.
• Design reliable APIs and durable workflows, maintaining compatibility across service components and deployments.
• Drive automated testing, failure injection, performance qualification, and safe production rollouts.
• Investigate complex production issues, contribute to on-call operations, and deliver lasting reliability improvements.
• Partner with product management and engineering teams to evaluate tradeoffs, establish technical direction, and mentor engineers through design and code reviews

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science or a related technical discipline, or comparable professional experience.
• At least six years developing production software, with substantial experience delivering distributed systems or cloud services.
• Proficiency in Java or Go, including concurrent programming, debugging, and performance analysis.
• Solid understanding of algorithms, data structures, operating systems, networking, and storage fundamentals.
• Practical knowledge of distributed-system behavior, including consistency, replication, retries, idempotency, partial failures, and recovery.
• Experience designing service APIs and evolving interfaces without disrupting existing consumers.
• Experience establishing automated unit, integration, and performance tests, supported by CI/CD practices.
• Experience operating production services: monitoring, troubleshooting, incident response, and participation in on-call rotations.
• Demonstrated ability to lead complex engineering work, communicate architectural decisions, and collaborate across teams.
• Sound engineering judgment when using AI-assisted development tools, including independent verification of correctness, security, and maintainability.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building messaging systems, distributed storage, event-processing platforms, or similar infrastructure services.
• Familiarity with technologies such as Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS, Azure Service Bus, or OCI Queue.
• Experience with consensus protocols such as Paxos or Raft, replicated state machines, durable logs, checkpoints, and crash recovery.
• Understanding of ordering guarantees, producer deduplication, delivery acknowledgements, visibility timeouts, and dead-letter handling.
• Experience with partitioning, load balancing, backpressure, resource quotas, capacity planning, and online workload migration.
• Experience with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, metadata caching, and asynchronous control-plane workflows.
• Experience profiling JVM or Go applications and diagnosing Linux networking, CPU, memory, and storage bottlenecks.
• Familiarity with containers, infrastructure automation, Terraform, and staged deployment practices.
• Experience designing secure multi-tenant services, including authorization, encryption, tenant isolation, and operational safeguards.
• A record of influencing architecture across teams and improving engineering practices through mentoring, reviews, and clear technical documentation.

Key Responsibilities

Software Development and Coding:

• Designs software solutions and analyzes and identifies requirements to achieve business and operational goals, sharing results with manager upon completion.

• Adheres to and improves execution of all phases of the software development lifecycle; provides guidance and coaching to engineers to drive improvements.

• Utilizes advanced knowledge to develop and guide new software features and enhancements leading design specifications, ensuring accessibility, and develops documents to clarify software design and code.

• Leads code reviews in multiple areas to help drive improvements.

• Conducts debugging and troubleshooting to identify and fix complex software issues.

• Develops fixes for identified issues.

• Implements comprehensive software testing (e.g., functional and non-functional testing), quality assurance processes, software error logging, monitoring, and observability for effective debugging, sharing work with manager and/or lead upon completion.

• Conducts performance profiling and optimization of coding, building scalable solutions, and anticipating and resolving potential outcomes.

• Troubleshoots and resolves complex issues related to application programming interface (API) functionality and integration. Implements complex API versioning, lifecycle, and interoperability strategies.

Software Architecture - Software System Structural Design:

• Implements and contributes to developing software, systems, and services, ensuring review by manager and/or senior technical leaders upon completion. Recommends project or design scope.

• Provides technical guidance and coaching to less experienced developers in existing software architecture.

• Contributes to periodic reviews and ensures adherence to architectural standards.

• Collaborates with stakeholders and networks externally to ensure work aligns with software architecture.

• Implements complex performance optimization and scalability strategies in software design.

• Occasionally conducts technology research and evaluation for potential architectural changes that may have an impact on results for the team.

Issue/Defect Collaboration - Software Products Support:

• Collaborates with stakeholders to understand customer issues and align solutions.

• May provide advanced technical guidance and support to customers regarding customer-reported issues.

• Advocates for customers' interests and suggests product enhancements based on feedback.

• Provides input to ensure customer satisfaction through timely resolution of issues and effective communication.

• Identifies and implements customer issue and/or defect handling and training processes.

• Investigates and troubleshoots complex and broad reaching/scoped maintenance issues to ensure customer agreement on short- and long-term solutions (e.g., future enhancements).

Practices and Standards Compliance - Security and Compliance:

• Collaborates with the team and externally to follow development practices and coding standards, providing coaching to less experienced team members.

• Participates in peer review processes, provides technical leadership, and ensures code quality and adherence to broad acceptance criteria during development, independently.

• Demonstrates and shares advanced knowledge of industry best practices and applies them to software development processes.

• Implements complex secure coding practices to prevent security vulnerabilities.

Development Operations - System Maintenance:

• Performs periodic maintenance and testing operations for systems that require upgrading or patching (e.g., for critical vulnerabilities), sharing results with manager upon completion.

• Drives improvements, ensures automation, testing, and debugging of systems to ensure service/product availability, health, support, and reliability.

Core Responsibilities

Planning & Execution:

• Manages and coordinates moderately complex tasks, monitoring timelines and deliverables to ensure timely completion and adherence to requirements for a moderately sized project or initiative.

• Efficiently delegates, monitors, and prioritizes work across multiple projects, providing technical oversight and adjusting plans to address shifts in resources or timelines.

Collaboration & Partnership:

• Collaborates across the organization to align on expectations and achieve shared objectives.

• Leverages understanding of business leaders, stakeholders, and/or customers to ensure proposed solutions meet their needs.

• Supports inclusivity by actively seeking and listening to diverse perspectives, ensuring others feel heard and respected.

Problem Solving:

• Identifies and addresses moderately complex issues by analyzing a wide range of data and/or information to identify solutions in accordance with standard practices.

• Proactively escalates unresolved or critical issues with a thorough assessment and suggests potential solutions.

• Reviews, contributes to, and documents problem solving strategies.

Continuous Learning:

• Pursues learning opportunities to expand knowledge and skills and/or tools in new areas and stays abreast of the latest industry trends and best practices.

• Proactively seeks and leverages ongoing feedback and training to improve skills.

• Coaches and mentors junior team members, fostering continuous learning and knowledge sharing within and across teams.

Continuous Improvement:

• Develops ideas, recommends updates, and/or collaborates on the implementation of process improvements to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of processes, protocols, and workflows across teams, and evaluates the impact on key stakeholders.

• Solicits feedback from others on ideas for alternative approaches and methods for continued improvement.

Performance and Development:

• Contributes to the talent development pipeline by participating in candidate interviews, assessing candidates, and providing hiring recommendations.

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.

As part of Oracle's onboarding process and consistent with applicable law, US-based employees are required to complete identity verification, which involves the collection and processing of their biometric information. Accommodations to this requirement may be granted following an individualized assessment.