Principal Engineer, Core Infrastructure
About the role
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.
Responsibilities
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 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 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.
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.
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.