Principal AI Agent / Software Engineer- Nashville

This role in onsite in Nashville, TN. The Principal AI Agent / 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. #LI-VC7 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 Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, AI/ML, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. 6-10+ 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. 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: $114,600 to $234,600 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 Oracle's 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 emplo