Lead Principal AI Software Engineer

Description

The Senior Principal AI Software Engineer is a Senior Staff-level hands-on technical leadership role responsible for defining building and operating next-generation AI systems on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This person will set architecture and engineering direction for production-grade agentic AI platforms autonomous workflows scalable inference infrastructure and enterprise AI applications used in large-scale business-critical environments.

This role requires a proven engineer who can translate ambiguous product and platform goals into durable technical strategy lead multi-team execution without direct authority and remain deeply hands-on in design code reviews operations and incident follow-up. The ideal candidate combines deep distributed systems experience with practical AI-native engineering including orchestration of LLMs tools APIs memory retrieval evaluation guardrails and cloud services. The expectation is to ship scale and operate reliable secure observable and cost-aware AI platform systems while raising the technical bar for engineers across the organization.

Responsibilities

Responsibilities

• Serve as a senior technical owner for OCI AI platform capabilities including agent execution inference systems model serving AI workflow orchestration evaluation and observability.
• Design architect and deliver scalable agentic AI systems capable of reasoning planning tool use workflow execution multi-step task orchestration and safe human-in-the-loop escalation.
• Build production-grade services for tool calling agent memory context management Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration vector retrieval multi-agent coordination policy enforcement and evaluation.
• Lead architecture across distributed services optimized for low latency high throughput GPU efficiency reliability cost operability and secure multi-tenant operation.
• Define service boundaries APIs data models state management consistency tradeoffs failure modes SLIs/SLOs rollout strategies and operational readiness criteria for AI platform services.
• Drive technical strategy across infrastructure platform security data and application engineering teams converting broad goals into executable multi-quarter plans and measurable milestones.
• Integrate AI agents securely and reliably with enterprise APIs cloud services databases identity systems secrets management and external systems.
• Establish AgentOps and LLMOps practices for tracing monitoring eval suites regression testing experimentation safety guardrails prompt/tool versioning and production reliability.
• Evaluate and operationalize emerging technologies in generative AI agentic workflows inference optimization long-context systems reasoning models AI developer tooling and agentic-first development.
• Drive engineering excellence through code reviews design reviews test strategy deployment automation incident analysis documentation and AI-assisted development practices using tools such as Codex Claude Code Cursor Copilot or similar systems.
• Mentor Staff and senior engineers raise architectural standards and influence engineering practices across OCI without requiring direct management authority.
• Own critical production outcomes including reliability performance security posture cost efficiency and supportability for the systems delivered.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelors Masters or Ph.D. in Computer Science AI/ML Engineering or a related field or equivalent practical experience.
• 12 years of professional software engineering experience including significant ownership of production systems; or equivalent experience demonstrating Senior Staff / Principal-level impact.
• Proven track record as a Staff Senior Staff Principal or equivalent technical leader influencing architecture and execution across multiple teams.
• Deep experience designing building and operating high-scale distributed systems cloud services infrastructure platforms or AI/ML platform services.
• Hands-on experience with production AI systems agentic AI applications autonomous workflows tool-using agents multi-step orchestration or multi-agent systems.
• Practical experience with orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph LangChain CrewAI AutoGen LlamaIndex or similar ecosystems.
• Deep understanding of LLM application patterns including prompt design structured outputs function/tool calling context management RAG memory tool safety and evaluation.
• Strong programming skills in Python and ability to contribute high-quality production code reviews tests and debugging in complex distributed environments.
• Strong expertise with Kubernetes Docker cloud-native infrastructure service-to-service communication scalability fault tolerance observability and performance analysis.
• Experience defining SLIs/SLOs production readiness criteria incident response practices monitoring tracing experiments and reliability programs for AI or distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of AI safety governance security and operational risks for autonomous or semi-autonomous systems including data handling access control auditability and human accountability.
• Excellent written and verbal communication with demonstrated ability to lead technical direction resolve ambiguity and influence senior stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience optimizing large-scale GPU inference or training workloads for latency throughput utilization availability and cost.
• Experience building or operating model serving inference gateways agent runtimes workflow engines developer platforms or internal AI productivity platforms.
• Experience integrating AI systems with enterprise APIs databases cloud services vector databases embeddings retrieval systems identity systems and policy enforcement layers.
• Experience with LLM fine-tuning long-context systems reasoning models model routing caching batching quantization or emerging generative AI research.
• Experience building evaluation frameworks for agentic systems including offline evals online experiments golden tasks adversarial testing regression gates and observability dashboards.
• Experience using AI-assisted software development tools such as Codex Claude Code Cursor Copilot or similar systems in large-scale engineering environments.
• Track record of defining architectural standards platform capabilities or engineering practices adopted across multiple teams or organizations.

Experience in enterprise cloud infrastructure regulated security-sensitive or mission-critical environments.

Qualifications
Disclaimer:

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: $169800 to $355400 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 Oracles 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.

Career Level - IC5