Principal Software Engineer, Core Infrastructure

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is hiring a Principal Software Engineer to help lead architecture and delivery for the SPLAT team. This onsite role in Nashville, TN focuses on building secure, reliable capabilities for API routing, service registration, traffic management, private connectivity, authentication, and operational controls, with hands-on technical leadership across distributed systems and high-throughput Java services.

What you’ll do

• Lead major systems and initiatives from problem definition and design through implementation, rollout, adoption, and production validation.
• Convert scalability, security, reliability, and business requirements into clear technical designs and execution plans.
• Make informed tradeoffs across availability, consistency, latency, throughput, durability, cost, and operational complexity.
• Design for real-world failure modes including partial failures, retries, duplicate requests, mixed-version deployments, dependency degradation, and regional disruption.
• Write and review secure, maintainable, well-tested Java code.
• Define service contracts, compatibility requirements, migration plans, validation strategies, and rollback criteria.
• Establish capacity models, performance objectives, scaling strategies, and load-testing plans for high-throughput services.
• Design throttling, load shedding, backpressure, caching, concurrency, and failure-recovery mechanisms.
• Define service indicators, objectives, metrics, alarms, dashboards, runbooks, and deployment safeguards.
• Lead complex incident investigations and turn recurring failures or manual procedures into automation and preventive engineering improvements.
• Act as a technical escalation point for issues that cross application, infrastructure, network, or organizational boundaries.
• Provide architectural direction across critical areas such as routing, authentication, private connectivity, runtime performance, observability, or deployment infrastructure.
• Decompose broad initiatives so multiple engineers can own meaningful work while maintaining architectural consistency.
• Mentor engineers through design, code review, delivery, and incident response.
• Improve engineering quality through reusable systems, tools, standards, and operational practices.
• Contribute to hiring and identify architectural investments, platform gaps, and reliability risks for the team roadmap.
• Align SPLAT and partner teams on technical decisions, responsibilities, dependencies, and rollout plans.
• Communicate complex designs, tradeoffs, risks, and progress clearly to engineers and leaders.
• Make progress under ambiguity by separating facts, assumptions, reversible decisions, and external dependencies, and adjust direction as production evidence changes.
• Use modern development and AI-assisted tools responsibly to improve engineering quality and productivity.

Core requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of experience designing, building, and operating production backend or platform services.
• Strong development experience in Java or another modern object-oriented language.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, concurrency, fault tolerance, and production operations.
• Experience leading substantial technical initiatives across multiple engineers or teams.
• Demonstrated ability to diagnose complex production issues and improve service reliability.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with high-throughput, low-latency services, HTTP, networking, proxies, or API gateways.
• Experience with authentication, authorization, TLS, certificates, private connectivity, or multi-tenant security.
• Experience with throttling, load shedding, caching, and capacity planning.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and deployment automation.
• Experience improving a broader engineering organization through mentoring, shared tooling, or technical standards.

Technologies

• Java
• HTTP
• TLS
• Kubernetes
• CI/CD
• Infrastructure as code