Principal Software Engineer, Core Infrastructure
Reston, VAFull-time$115–235K/yrPosted 4 days agoStill listed 2 days ago
Most applications go out cold — see where you stand first. No sign-up to start.
You apply on the employer's site, with no Olive account needed.
Watch jobs like this. New roles like this one near Reston, VA, by email.
Don't just apply. Show up ready.
Olive works from this exact posting.
At a glance
Olive lists jobs from US employers, including remote roles you can work from the United States.
Job overview
The Principal Software Engineer will lead the design and development of scalable distributed systems and cloud services for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The role focuses on performance, reliability, operational readiness, security, and automation across high-throughput workloads. The engineer will guide incident response, mentor colleagues, manage moderately complex initiatives, and collaborate across teams to deliver solutions aligned with customer and business needs.
Skills & qualifications
Skills
Benefits
Full job description
As Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) continues its rapid expansion, we are seeking a skilled Software Engineer to join our newly established Cloud Performance Organization. This team plays a key role in addressing service inefficiencies, reducing cloud expenses, improving customer experience, and ensuring scalability. Your work will focus on optimizing the performance of OCI’s critical components, internal tools, and applications while fostering a culture of performance engineering. This is a greenfield opportunity to design and build new cloud services from the ground up. We are growing fast, still at an early stage, and working on ambitious new initiatives. You will be part of a team of smart, motivated, diverse people, and given the autonomy as well as support to do your best work. It is a dynamic and flexible workplace where you’ll belong and be encouraged. Leads development and architecture of scalable, elastic distributed systems for high-throughput, hyperscale workloads. Designs fault-tolerant, highly available systems with robust observability, testing, replication, and resilience mechanisms to meet SLOs. Drives operational readiness, production troubleshooting, and peer mentorship while implementing security, compliance, IaC, and automation for safe patching, upgrades, and rollbacks.
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 [email protected] or by calling 1-888-404-2494 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. At Technical Strategy and Oversight (TSO) organization, our mission is to support customer choice, transparency, and value when it comes to cloud infrastructure. We’re embarking on ambitious new initiatives such as building new innovative platforms, high performance primitives, frameworks to support OCI developers, and new container runtime that will allow us to run the full variety of OCI services, including our most demanding, high-performance, high-availability services. We’re also working on providing canonical implementation of core components for data planes through a data-plane runtime framework, developing a remote persistent storage solution with the latency and performance comparable to that of a local nVME drive, and developing standards and tools to identify critical performance improvements across OCI data-planes. 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:
- 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
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. Key Responsibilities
System Design & Architecture
- Lead development and architecture of scalable, elastic distributed systems for high-throughput, hyperscale workloads.
- Define scalability requirements, optimize performance, and leverage distributed state management and data-plane platforms.
- Design fault-tolerant, highly available systems using redundancy, replication, failover, load shedding, throttling, and rate limiting.
- Establish SLOs, KPIs, telemetry, dashboards, and alerts to ensure reliability and performance.
- Design performance, load, fault-injection, and brownout testing, and implement replication and synchronization for correctness and availability.
Operational Excellence
- Proactively diagnose production issues, guide incident response and root cause analysis, and ensure operational readiness.
- Enable in-service maintenance and upgrades with minimal customer impact.
- Mentor engineers in troubleshooting and operational practices.
Security & Compliance
- Implement encryption, access controls, and security remediation for multi-tenant environments.
- Ensure compliance with applicable standards and maintain required documentation.
Automation & Change Management
- Develop and maintain IaC and automation for cloud infrastructure.
- Enable safe and repeatable patching, updates, and rollbacks through effective change-management practices.
Core Responsibilities
Planning & Execution
- Manage moderately complex initiatives, prioritizing work, timelines, resources, and deliverables while providing technical oversight.
Collaboration & Partnership
- Collaborate across teams and stakeholders to align objectives and deliver solutions that meet business and customer needs.
- Promote inclusive collaboration and diverse perspectives.
Problem Solving
- Analyze and resolve moderately complex issues, escalating critical concerns with clear assessments and recommended solutions.
- Document and share effective problem-solving practices.
Continuous Learning
- Stay current with industry trends and continuously develop technical skills.
- Coach and mentor junior engineers and promote knowledge sharing.
Continuous Improvement
- Identify and implement improvements to processes, workflows, and team effectiveness.
- Evaluate outcomes and incorporate stakeholder feedback.
Performance & Development
- Support talent development through candidate interviews, assessments, and hiring recommendations.
How this job compares
Set against the 41,428 open Software Engineer jobs on Olive Jobs, counted November 9, 2026.
- Pay
- This posting$115–235K/yr
- Virginia median$129–205K/yr1,545 salary ranges
- US median$135–219K/yr32,987 salary ranges
This range's midpoint, $175K, is 3% above the Virginia median midpoint ($169K) — in the middle half of Software Engineer salary ranges in Virginia.
- Openings
- Olive Jobs lists 1,829 open Software Engineer jobs in Virginia and 41,428 across the US. 8% of them nationwide are listed as remote or flexible.
- Hiring the most in Virginia
- Capital One201 open
- Amazon137 open
- Deloitte103 open
- Experience
- Software Engineer postings that state a minimum ask for 5 years of experience at the median; the middle half ask for 3 to 7 years (33,932 postings).
- Education
- 12,957 of the 41,428 open Software Engineer jobs (31%) ask for a bachelor's degree or higher.
Counted across the open, public US postings on Olive Jobs on November 9, 2026. Pay medians are the middle values of the low ends and of the high ends of postings that list both ends of a range in the same cadence (a yearly salary or an hourly rate); a range's midpoint is halfway between its ends. Pay and experience figures resting on fewer than 20 postings are left out.
Prepare for this role
You've read the whole posting — now see how you match it.


