Lead Principal Platform Software Engineer, Shepherd — IC5

hackajob is collaborating with Oracle to connect them with exceptional professionals for this role.

About the role

Shepherd is OCI's cloud-scale release orchestration platform, enabling the safe and reliable deployment of software, infrastructure, and configuration changes across regions, realms, and critical cloud services. As OCI continues to expand into sovereign, regulated, and large-scale deployment environments, Shepherd is evolving into a resilient orchestration control plane for cloud-scale change. We are seeking a Lead Principal Platform Software Engineer to lead the evolution of Shepherd's architecture and engineering practices. This hands-on technical leadership role requires deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud platform architecture, deployment orchestration, and operational excellence.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture, design, and implementation of Shepherd platform capabilities for release orchestration, deployment safety, rollback automation, dependency modeling, and operational workflows.
• Design and build highly available distributed systems that operate reliably across cloud-scale, multi-region, and partially connected environments.
• Drive long-term platform architecture, including APIs, service boundaries, persistence models, workflow execution, resiliency, compatibility, and extensibility.
• Partner across engineering, SRE, security, compliance, infrastructure, and OCI service teams to deliver cross-organizational technical initiatives.
• Establish engineering standards for code quality, testing, documentation, observability, operational readiness, and maintainability.
• Provide technical leadership through architecture reviews, design documents, production-ready code, mentoring, and incident investigations.
• Develop automation and AI-assisted engineering workflows that improve developer productivity while maintaining production quality, security, and reliability.
• Continuously improve platform reliability, deployment safety, operational efficiency, and engineering excellence.

Requirements

• Strong experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems in production cloud environments.
• Deep understanding of cloud platform architecture, orchestration systems, APIs, resiliency, observability, and operational safety.
• Strong programming skills in Java, Python, Go, TypeScript, or similar languages.
• Experience leading complex cross-functional technical initiatives and influencing architecture across teams.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals including testing, code quality, design patterns, and maintainability.
• Experience with databases, distributed systems, API design, and production debugging.
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted software engineering and engineering automation.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, technical leadership, and mentoring skills.

Preferred Experience

• Experience with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) or another hyperscale cloud platform.
• Experience with deployment orchestration, release automation, cloud control planes, or internal developer platforms.
• Experience with compliance-sensitive or sovereign cloud environments.
• Experience defining engineering standards, SLOs, rollout policies, and observability frameworks.
• Experience developing reusable platform libraries, automation frameworks, and reference implementations.

Pay

US: Hiring Range in USD from: $135,200 to $306,400 per annum. May be eligible for bonus, equity, and compensation deferral.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, including expert medical opinion
• Short term disability and long term disability
• Life insurance and AD&D
• Supplemental life insurance (Employee/Spouse/Child)
• Health care and dependent care Flexible Spending Accounts
• Pre-tax commuter and parking benefits
• 401(k) Savings and Investment Plan with company match
• 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.
• 11 paid holidays
• 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.
• Paid parental leave
• Adoption assistance
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Financial planning and group legal
• Voluntary benefits including auto, homeowner and pet insurance