Principal Engineer, Core Infrastructure

Within OCI, the Technical Strategy & Oversight organization builds foundational systems for OCI’s most demanding services. One of its boldest initiatives is Autonomous OCI : a greenfield effort to build a cloud platform that can operate and scale with far less manual work. Today, every new region and service feature adds operational cost and complexity. Autonomous OCI is designed to change that by making services fast, resilient, and self-healing by default—helping OCI scale to thousands of regions without growing operations teams at the same rate. As a Principal Member of Technical Staff, you will help shape Lightweight Infrastructure (LWI) , the next-generation runtime and platform layer for compute, storage, networking, identity, observability, and governance. Qualifications BS/MS in Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience. 6–10+ years of software engineering experience building highly available, scalable distributed systems or cloud infrastructure. Strong programming skills in Java, Go, Rust, C/C++, or a similar systems or backend language. Deep experience in one or more core infrastructure areas: distributed systems, cloud control planes, management planes, scheduling, virtualization, storage, networking, security, reliability, or platform automation. Ability to independently lead the design and delivery of complex services that must be correct, resilient, observable, and easy to operate. Strong understanding of failure handling, concurrency, asynchronous workflows, safe retries, and lifecycle management in distributed systems. Strong debugging and problem-solving skills, including the ability to drive resolution for complex production and performance issues. Experience collaborating across teams and turning broad platform goals into clear designs and executable plans. Ability to raise the technical bar through mentoring, design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on technical leadership. Leads development and begins architecting components of scalable, elastic distributed systems. Defines and enforces scalability requirements for owned components; optimizes code and data paths for high‑throughput, hyper‑scale workloads; and leverages data plane platforms for large‑scale retrieval, storage, and processing. Designs fault‑tolerant, in‑service‑upgradable systems using redundancy, replication, failover, and policies for partitions, applying load‑shedding, throttling, and rate‑limiting to handle network unreliability while meeting SLOs. Establishes KPIs and telemetry; builds proactive dashboards and alerts; and designs complex validation (fault injection, brownouts), replication, and synchronization for correctness and durability. Proactively diagnoses and resolves production issues, mentors peers, and ensures operational readiness. Implements robust security controls, executes remediation, maintains compliance documentation, and develops IaC and automation that enable safe patching, updates, and rollbacks within change‑management plans. Key Responsibilities System Design & Architecture - System Scalability: –Lead the development and implementation, and begin to architect, components of scalable distributed systems that support horizontal and vertical scaling to meet system demands, including leveraging distributed state management tools. –Optimize code and/or systems for large-scale data processing and high-throughput requirements to support hyper-scale systems. –Define scalability requirements for owned components and ensure design and implementation requirements are met. –Design systems to scale with elasticity (e.g., effectively scaling both up and down). –Leverage data plane platforms to effectively handle large-scale data retrieval, storage, and processing. –Design performance and load testing. System Design & Architecture - System Reliability Design: –Build and design fault-tolerant components and systems capable of withstanding in-service updates by implementing redundancy, replication, and automatic failover mechanisms. –Design systems to effectively handle service disruptions (e.g., network partitions) by prioritizing consistency, availability, or partition tolerance. –Implement and optimize approaches to handle network unreliability, including load-shedding, throttling, and rate-limiting. –Design components and systems that are durable and adhere to service level objectives (SLOs), setting expectations for availability and durability of other computing services within the department. System Design & Architecture - System Reliability Performance: –Define key performance indicators (KPIs) and telemetry to identify gaps or issues in running systems. –Build and customize moderately complex dashboards, telemetry systems, and alerting mechanisms to proactively monitor components and system health.. System Design & Architecture - Correctness / Availability: –Design and implement functional and correctness requirements for feature sets and/or systems in new or existing systems. –Design complex test scenarios (e.g., fault-injection, brown-out) to evaluate system correctness. –Implement data replication and synchronization techniques to maintain data integrity and availability. Operational Troubleshooting & Incident Management: –Take a proactive role in diagnosing, debugging, and resolving issues in active components and systems to support ongoing operation, and mentor others in these processes. –Implement strategies to prevent interruptions, ensuring no maintenance windows are required for customers and users when resolving issues. –Maintain expertise in owned components and systems to ensure effective troubleshooting and performance. –Meet operational readiness expectations through design and implementation. –Serve in operational support rotations, providing guidance in incident response and root cause investigations. Compliance & Security: –Implement robust security measures to protect data and applications in multi-tenant environments, including encryption techniques and access controls. –Execute remediation plans to address identified security gaps. –Ensure cloud infrastructure is in compliance with industry standards and regulations and that documentation is up to date. Automation & Change Management: –Develop and maintain automation scripts and tools (e.g., Infrastructure as Code (IaC)) to manage cloud infrastructure. –Create and adhere to change management plans for patching, updating, and rolling back applications, and begin designing systems and components to allow for automation of these processes. 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 con