Principal Software Development Engineer

Job-ID: 348887 Category: Product and Research Location: Nashville, TN, United States; United States Schedule: Full time Posted: 2026-10-27 Closes: 2027-04-25 Role: Individual Contributor Job Type: Regular Employee Does this position require a security clearance?: No Years: 6 to 10+ years Applicants are required to read, write, and speak the following languages: English *This position is based onsite in Nashville, TN - We are able to provide relocation assistance We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to help design, build, and operate the foundational systems behind a highly available, durable, and globally distributed object storage service. In this senior individual-contributor role, you will solve complex distributed-systems problems at massive scale and set technical direction across critical storage-platform capabilities. You will work with engineers across storage, networking, security, control plane, and observability to deliver resilient systems that customers can trust with their most important data. What You'll Do * Architect and deliver core infrastructure for object storage, including metadata, data placement, replication, lifecycle management, and durability workflows. * Lead the design of distributed systems that provide strong availability, consistency, performance, and operational simplicity at scale. * Improve service reliability through fault isolation, automated remediation, disaster recovery design, capacity planning, and rigorous operational practices. * Drive technical strategy for complex, cross-team initiatives; influence architecture and execution beyond your immediate team. * Investigate and resolve challenging production issues, using deep systems expertise to prevent recurrence. * Build tooling, automation, and observability that make the service easier to operate, diagnose, and evolve. * Partner with security and compliance teams to embed secure-by-design practices into storage infrastructure. * Establish engineering standards through design reviews, technical mentorship, and clear written communication. Qualifications 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 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. 9. 11 paid holidays 10. 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. 11. Paid parental leave 12. Adoption assistance 13. Employee Stock Purchase Plan 14. Financial planning and group legal 15. Voluntary benefits including auto, homeowner and pet insurance The role will generally accept applications for at least three calendar days from the posting date or as long as the job remains posted. As part of Oracle's onboarding process and consistent with applicable law, US-based employees are required to complete identity verification, which involves the collection and processing of their biometric information. Accommodations to this requirement may be granted following an individualized assessment. Responsibilities Strong software engineering experience in Java or a similar programming language, including designing, developing, testing, debugging, and maintaining production-quality services. * Deep understanding of object-oriented programming principles, including abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, composition, and appropriate application of common design patterns. * Experience designing clean, extensible APIs and service interfaces, with an emphasis on maintainability, testability, backward compatibility, and operational safety. * Demonstrated experience designing and building distributed systems, including services that operate across multiple hosts, availability domains, or regions. * Strong knowledge of distributed-systems concepts such as replication, consistency, consensus, partition tolerance, leader election, idempotency, retries, failure handling, and eventual consistency. * Experience designing systems for high availability, scalability, fault tolerance, and data durability. * Experience with concurrent and multithreaded programming, performance analysis, memory management, and diagnosing latency or throughput bottlenecks in Java services. * Proficiency with unit, integration, and end-to-end testing practices, including designing tests for failure scenarios and distributed-system edge cases. * Experience using observability tools and practices, including metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and production debugging. * Ability to write clear technical design documents, evaluate architectural tradeoffs, and lead design reviews for complex services. * Strong collaboration skills and experience partnering with engineering, security, networking, and operations teams. * Proven ability to mentor engineers, raise engineering standards, and provide technical leadership without direct people-management responsibility. Preferred Qualifications * Experience with object storage systems, distributed databases, file systems, or other large-scale data platforms. * Knowledge of storage-system concepts such as metadata management, object lifecycle operations, data placement, replication or erasure coding, and recovery from hardware or infrastructure failures. * Experience designing systems that span multiple regions or availability domains. * Experience operating services with demanding availability, durability, latency, or throughput requirements. * Familiarity with RESTful APIs, asynchronous processing, message queues, and event-driven architectures. * Experience with containerized environments, cloud infrastructure, and automated deployment pipelines. * Knowledge of security practices for cloud services, including authentication, authorization, encryption, and secure data handling. About the company Only Oracle brings together the data, infrastructure, applications, and expertise to power everything from industry innovations to life-saving care. And with AI embedded across our products and services, we help customers turn that promise into a better future for all. Discover your potential at a company leading the way in AI and cloud solutions that impact billions of lives. True innovation starts when everyone is empowered to contribute. That’s why we’re committed to growing a workforce that promotes opportunities for all with competitive benefits that support our people with flexible medical, life insurance, and retirement options. We also encourage employees to give back to their communities through our volunteer programs. We’re committed to including people with disabilities at all stages of the employment process. If you require accessibility assistance or accommodation for a disability at any point, let us know by emailing View email address on click.appcast.io or by calling View phone number on click.appcast.io in the United States. Oracle is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability and protected veterans’ status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Oracle will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records pursuant to applicable law.