Principal Engineer Jobs in Nashville, TN

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) builds and operates cloud services at global scale in a distributed, multi-tenant environment. Our engineers solve complex problems in distributed systems, highly available services, and virtualized infrastructure, delivering the platforms customers rely on to run their business-critical applications.

The OCI FastConnect team delivers high-performance, highly available private connectivity between customer networks and OCI. We design, build, and operate the networking services that help enterprises connect reliably to the cloud and scale with confidence.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will lead the design and development of FastConnect control plane services that manage a globally distributed fleet of networking infrastructure. You will drive technical decisions, build resilient distributed systems, and develop automation that improves how we deploy, operate, and scale the service worldwide. You will also work across engineering and operations teams to resolve production challenges, improve reliability, and mentor other engineers.

This role combines software development, systems engineering, infrastructure automation, and network operations. We value engineers who take ownership, seek simple solutions to complex problems, and exercise sound judgment in ambiguous situations. If you enjoy building services, understanding how systems behave in production, and turning operational challenges into lasting engineering improvements, we would like to hear from you.

Key Responsibilities

System Design and Architecture

• Lead the design, development, and implementation of control plane components that manage a globally distributed fleet of high-performance enterprise networking equipment.
• Build scalable distributed systems that support horizontal and vertical scaling, including distributed state management.
• Define scalability requirements for owned components and ensure designs and implementations meet them.
• Optimize code and systems for large-scale data processing and high-throughput workloads.
• Integrate with data plane platforms to support large-scale data retrieval, storage, and processing.
• Design performance and load tests to validate capacity, scalability, and system behavior.

Reliability, Availability, and Correctness

• Design fault-tolerant components that support in-service updates through redundancy, replication, and automatic failover.
• Define system behavior during service disruptions, including network partitions, with explicit consistency and availability tradeoffs.
• Implement load shedding, throttling, and rate limiting to manage overload and network unreliability.
• Design systems to meet service level objectives (SLOs) for availability, performance, and durability, and establish requirements for dependent services.
• Define and implement functional and correctness requirements for new and existing features.
• Develop fault-injection, brownout, and other complex test scenarios to validate correctness and resilience.
• Implement replication and synchronization mechanisms to preserve data integrity and availability.

Observability and Performance

• Define key performance indicators (KPIs), metrics, and telemetry to identify performance gaps and operational issues.
• Build dashboards, monitoring, and alerts that provide actionable insight into component and system health.

Operational Troubleshooting and Incident Management

• Diagnose, debug, and resolve production issues, and mentor others in effective troubleshooting.
• Develop remediation approaches that minimize service disruption and avoid customer maintenance windows.
• Maintain deep expertise in owned components to support reliable operation and performance.
• Meet operational readiness requirements through design, implementation, testing, and documentation.
• Participate in operational support rotations and guide incident response, root cause analysis, and preventive actions.

Security and Compliance

• Implement security controls for multi-tenant environments, including encryption and access management.
• Remediate identified security gaps.
• Ensure owned infrastructure and systems meet applicable industry standards, regulatory requirements, and documentation expectations.

Automation and Change Management

• Develop and maintain tools and infrastructure as code (IaC) to automate infrastructure management.
• Create and follow change management plans for patching, deployment, and rollback.
• Design components to support automated updates, recovery, and operational workflows.

Core Responsibilities

Planning and Execution

• Own delivery of moderately complex projects, managing scope, priorities, dependencies, timelines, and technical requirements.
• Coordinate work across contributors and projects, provide technical oversight, and adjust plans as resources or priorities change.

Collaboration and Partnership

• Work across teams to align expectations and deliver shared objectives.
• Translate stakeholder and customer needs into practical technical solutions.
• Seek diverse perspectives and create an environment where colleagues feel heard and respected.

Problem Solving

• Resolve moderately complex problems through structured analysis of technical data and system behavior.
• Escalate critical or unresolved issues with a clear assessment, impact, and recommended options.
• Document decisions, troubleshooting methods, and reusable solutions.

Learning and Mentorship

• Expand technical expertise and stay current with relevant industry practices and tools.
• Seek and apply feedback to improve effectiveness.
• Coach and mentor junior engineers and share knowledge within and across teams.

Continuous Improvement

• Identify and implement improvements to engineering processes, operational practices, and team workflows.
• Gather feedback, evaluate alternatives, and assess the impact of changes on stakeholders.

Hiring and Talent Development

• Participate in interviews, assess candidates, and provide evidence-based hiring recommendations.

Qualifications

• 9+ years of experience in systems or application development.
• 5+ years of experience in distributed systems or network programming.
• Proficiency in at least two of the following languages: Java, C, C++, Python, Scala, or Go.
• Strong understanding of data structures, algorithms, and operating systems.
• Proficiency in BGP, TCP/IP, and networking fundamentals.
• A methodical approach to troubleshooting large, complex, interconnected systems.
• Experience designing and operating production architectures, with a strong understanding of scalability, system design, and cloud computing design patterns.
• Experience developing software for large-scale infrastructure, cloud platforms, or web services.
• Knowledge of change management, continuous integration, and deployment best practices.
• A demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity, prioritize competing needs, and manage escalations.
• Familiarity with infrastructure automation tools such as Terraform, Chef, or Ansible, along with working knowledge of Linux.
• A bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related engineering field.