Principal Engineer, Distributed Systems & Kernel Programming

Salary: $142,000 - 194,000 per year Requirements:

• Bachelors or masters degree in computer science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience; the minimum qualifications also specify 11 years of software development experience, or a relevant bachelors or B.Tech degree plus 7 years of software development experience.
• 6–10+ years of 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 at least one core infrastructure area, such as distributed systems, cloud control planes, scheduling, virtualization, storage, networking, security, reliability, or platform automation.
• Ability to lead the design and delivery of complex services that are 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 resolving complex production and performance issues.
• Experience collaborating across teams and translating broad platform goals into clear designs and executable plans.
• Ability to provide technical leadership and raise engineering standards through mentoring and design and code reviews.

• Lead development and contribute to the architecture of scalable, elastic distributed systems and infrastructure components.
• Define scalability requirements; optimize systems for high throughput and large-scale workloads; and design performance and load tests.
• Design fault-tolerant, durable systems that support in-service upgrades, replication, failover, and service-level objectives.
• Address network disruptions with approaches such as load shedding, throttling, and rate limiting.
• Define performance indicators and telemetry, and build dashboards and alerts to monitor system health.
• Establish correctness requirements and design fault-injection and brownout testing, data replication, and synchronization.
• Diagnose and resolve production issues, support incident response and root-cause investigations, and mentor colleagues in operational troubleshooting.
• Design for operational readiness and reduce service interruptions during maintenance and issue resolution.
• Implement security controls, remediate security gaps, and maintain compliance documentation.
• Develop infrastructure-as-code tools and automation, and plan and execute safe patching, updates, and rollbacks.
• Coordinate project work, prioritize and delegate tasks, track deliverables, and adjust plans as needed.
• Collaborate with stakeholders across the organization, address complex problems, and contribute to process improvements.
• Continue learning, share knowledge, coach junior team members, and participate in candidate interviews and assessments.

• Backend
• Cloud
• Support
• Java
• LESS
• Network
• Oracle
• Rust
• Security
• Architect
• DevOps
• Incident Management
• Windows

More:

We at Oracle are working with hackajob to connect professionals with this opportunity in our OCI Technical Strategy & Oversight organization, which builds foundational systems for demanding cloud services. The role focuses on Autonomous OCI, a greenfield initiative to create a cloud platform that is resilient, self-healing, and able to scale with less manual operational effort. As a Principal Member of Technical Staff, you will help shape Lightweight Infrastructure (LWI), the next-generation platform layer for compute, storage, networking, identity, observability, and governance, supporting OCIs ambition to expand across thousands of regions without proportionally increasing operations teams.

last updated 42 week of 2026