Lead Principal Software Engineer, Core Infrastructure

Description

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) team offers the opportunity to build and operate massive-scale integrated cloud services in a broadly distributed multi-tenant cloud environment. OCI builds cloud products for customers who are tackling some of the worlds largest technical and business challenges.

Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE) is OCIs managed Kubernetes service. OKE enables customers to create run scale secure and operate Kubernetes clusters on OCI integrating Kubernetes with OCI compute networking storage identity observability security and automation. The OKE team owns a highly available 24x7 cloud service and is expanding the platform to support larger clusters higher scale improved operability deeper OCI integrations and increasingly demanding cloud native AI and GPU workloads.

We are looking for a senior IC5 software engineer with deep Kubernetes expertise required cloud infrastructure experience and a strong distributed systems background. This is a high-impact technical leadership role for an engineer who can define architecture drive cross-team execution solve ambiguous production and platform problems and deliver durable systems that improve both customer experience and operational excellence.

You will work on core OKE platform capabilities including cluster lifecycle management orchestration scalability reliability performance automation observability security and integration with OCI infrastructure services. The ideal candidate has hands-on experience designing building operating or deeply debugging production cloud services infrastructure platforms or Kubernetes-based systems at meaningful scale.

This role requires advanced Kubernetes experience including Kubernetes control plane behavior controllers and operators scheduling autoscaling networking storage service discovery container runtimes node lifecycle Kubernetes APIs and etcd. Experience with Kubernetes networking and storage technologies such as CNI Cilium Calico Flannel other container networking implementations CSI drivers and cloud provider integrations is highly relevant.

OKE is also expanding to support demanding AI and accelerated computing use cases. Experience with AI/ML infrastructure multi-node GPU clusters accelerated compute model training or inference platforms GPU scheduling device plugins Karpenter cluster autoscaling CUDA NCCL RoCE InfiniBand RDMA SmartNIC/DPU offload or high-performance AI/HPC networking is a significant plus.

This role also requires an engineer who is ready to use modern agentic engineering practices responsibly. We expect senior engineers to apply AI-assisted and agentic workflows to accelerate design exploration implementation testing debugging documentation operational analysis and developer productivity while maintaining strong ownership security judgment code quality and production accountability.

Responsibilities

As a member of the software engineering division you will take an active role in defining and evolving standard practices and procedures. You will define specifications for significant new projects and specify design develop troubleshoot and debug software for OCIs managed Kubernetes service.

Responsibilities include:

• Provide technical leadership for major OKE platform initiatives from architecture through implementation launch and production operation.
• Design and build distributed systems that create update scale repair and operate Kubernetes clusters across OCI regions.
• Improve OKE reliability scalability performance upgrade safety lifecycle management observability automation and operational tooling.
• Work deeply with Kubernetes technologies including control plane components controllers/operators scheduling autoscaling Kubernetes APIs container runtimes node behavior and etcd.
• Design debug and improve Kubernetes networking and storage integrations including CNI-based networking Cilium Calico Flannel other container networking implementations CSI drivers and OCI infrastructure integrations.
• Build automation for cluster validation health checks readiness testing failure detection remote recovery and reduction of post-deployment operational issues.
• Lead technical design reviews code reviews incident reviews and production readiness reviews for complex service changes.
• Debug difficult production issues across service boundaries including Kubernetes Linux networking compute storage identity telemetry and OCI infrastructure dependencies.
• Apply performance engineering practices including profiling tracing latency analysis throughput optimization and production diagnostics across distributed systems.
• Build automation that reduces manual operations improves fleet health accelerates diagnosis and raises the quality bar for OKE engineering.
• Partner with OCI service teams to deliver end-to-end platform capabilities regardless of organizational boundaries.
• Apply AI-assisted and agentic engineering workflows to improve engineering velocity test coverage debugging operational analysis and documentation while ensuring correctness security and maintainability.
• Mentor engineers influence technical direction and help establish patterns that scale across the OKE organization.
• Participate in operating a 24x7 cloud service and use customer feedback production data and operational experience to prioritize improvements.

Required qualifications:

• 10 years of software engineering experience or equivalent experience building and operating production software systems.
• Hands-on cloud infrastructure experience is required ideally designing building operating or debugging production services or platforms on OCI AWS Azure GCP or a large-scale private cloud.
• Strong hands-on Kubernetes expertise is required including Kubernetes architecture APIs control plane behavior controllers/operators scheduling autoscaling networking storage nodes cluster lifecycle management or production cluster operations.
• Advanced Kubernetes knowledge including CNI CSI etcd service discovery container runtimes node lifecycle and Kubernetes failure modes.
• Experience with Kubernetes networking technologies such as Cilium Calico Flannel or other CNI implementations.
• Experience with Kubernetes storage integrations including CSI drivers or cloud storage integrations.
• Strong distributed systems fundamentals including availability failure handling performance scalability and operational tradeoffs.
• Experience building highly available infrastructure services platform services or cloud native systems used in production.
• Strong development experience in both Go/Golang and Java is required.
• Strong Linux networking debugging and production operations skills.
• Demonstrated ability to lead ambiguous technical projects influence across teams and deliver through other engineers without relying on formal authority.
• Strong communication skills ownership judgment and ability to make pragmatic tradeoffs in production systems.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience with AI/ML infrastructure GPU workloads multi-node GPU clusters accelerated compute model training or inference platforms GPU scheduling device plugins Karpenter cluster autoscaling CUDA NCCL high-performance networking or distributed training systems.
• Experience with eBPF-based networking Kubernetes network policy service mesh ingress load balancing overlays/underlays BGP VXLAN SmartNIC/DPU offload RoCE InfiniBand RDMA or multi-cluster networking.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and cloud provisioning tools such as Terraform Packer cloud-init IAM VCN/VPC networking VPN FastConnect/Direct Connect or equivalent cloud primitives.
• Experience building developer productivity operational automation or responsible AI-assisted and agentic engineering workflows.
• Experience with observability systems incident response safe deployment practices canary analysis rollback strategies service health automation and large fleet operations.
• Open-source or upstream contribution experience in Kubernetes cloud native infrastructure observability networking or related systems.

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: $135200 to $306400 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