Principal Software Engineer, Core Infrastructure

Secure, scalable infrastructure is at the center of this Principal Software Engineer role on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s SPLAT team. You will lead architecture and delivery for capabilities that support secure API routing, service registration, traffic management, private connectivity, authentication, and operational controls. This position combines hands-on technical leadership with deep engineering rigor across distributed systems, high-throughput Java services, networking, security, observability, and production reliability.

You will turn scalability, security, reliability, and business requirements into designs and execution plans, make tradeoffs across availability, consistency, latency, throughput, durability, cost, and operational complexity, and guide delivery from problem definition through rollout, adoption, and production validation. The work also includes building resilient systems that handle partial failures, retries, duplicate requests, mixed-version deployments, dependency degradation, and regional disruption.

Responsibilities

• Lead significant systems and initiatives from problem definition and design through implementation, rollout, adoption, and production validation.
• Translate scalability, security, reliability, and business requirements into clear technical designs and execution plans.
• Make sound tradeoffs across availability, consistency, latency, throughput, durability, cost, and operational complexity.
• Design for partial failures, retries, duplicate requests, mixed-version deployments, dependency degradation, and regional disruption.
• Write and review secure, maintainable, well-tested Java.
• 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.
• Serve as a technical escalation point for issues spanning application, infrastructure, network, or organizational boundaries.
• Provide architectural direction across critical areas including 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.
• Raise engineering quality through reusable systems, tools, standards, and operational practices.
• Contribute to hiring and help 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; adjust direction when production evidence or new information invalidates earlier assumptions.
• Use modern development and AI-assisted tools responsibly to improve engineering quality and productivity.

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.

Location: Nashville, TN (onsite)

Technologies: Java, HTTP, TLS, Kubernetes, CI/CD, infrastructure as code

Core Skills

• Software Design and Development
• Backend Programming Languages
• Distributed Systems
• System Design