Principal Engineer Jobs in Nashville, TN
Principal Engineer jobs in Nashville are concentrated in Midtown, The Gulch, and the Cool Springs corridor, with strong demand across healthcare technology, enterprise software, and advanced manufacturing. Employers posting roles right now include Oracle, Verizon, and Starbucks. See the openings below and apply to the ones that match your experience.
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The Principal Core Infrastructure Software Engineer is a Senior Staff-level, hands-on technical leadership role responsible for defining, building, and operating next-generation AI systems on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This person will set architecture and engineering direction for production-grade cloud distributed systems, agentic AI platforms, autonomous workflows, scalable inference infrastructure, and enterprise AI applications used in large-scale, business-critical environments.
This role requires a proven engineer who can translate ambiguous product and platform goals into durable technical strategy, lead multi-team execution without direct authority, and remain deeply hands-on in design, code, reviews, operations, and incident follow-up. The ideal candidate combines deep distributed systems experience with practical AI-native engineering, including orchestration of LLMs, tools, APIs, memory, retrieval, evaluation, guardrails, and cloud services. The expectation is to ship, scale, and operate reliable, secure, observable, and cost-aware AI platform systems while raising the technical bar for engineers across the organization.
- 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.
- Design, architect, and deliver scalable agentic AI systems capable of reasoning, planning, tool use, workflow execution, multi-step task orchestration, and safe human-in-the-loop escalation.
- Define scalability, performance, availability, and durability requirements for owned services and components.
- Build fault-tolerant systems that support redundancy, replication, automated failover, and in-service upgrades.
- Optimize services for high-throughput, low-latency, and large-scale cloud workloads.
- Design systems that handle network unreliability, service disruptions, and partition scenarios while meeting SLOs.
- Establish telemetry, KPIs, dashboards, and alerts to monitor service health, performance, reliability, and customer impact.
- Drive performance testing, load testing, fault injection, brownout testing, and other validation strategies to ensure correctness and resiliency.
- Implement secure infrastructure controls for multi-tenant cloud environments, including access controls, encryption, and remediation of security gaps.
- Develop automation, Infrastructure as Code, and deployment tooling to support safe patching, updates, rollbacks, and operational recovery.
- Take ownership of production operations, including troubleshooting, incident response, root cause analysis, and ongoing service improvements.
- Strengthen operational readiness by improving runbooks, monitoring, change management, deployment safety, and recovery processes.
- Collaborate with partner teams across OCI to align architecture, dependencies, and service requirements.
- Mentor engineers, review technical designs, guide implementation decisions, and help raise the engineering bar across the team.
Required Qualifications:
- Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, AI/ML, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 6-10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant ownership of production systems; or equivalent experience demonstrating Senior Staff / Principal-level impact.
- Deep experience designing, building, and operating high-scale distributed systems, cloud services, infrastructure platforms, or AI/ML platform services.
- Strong programming skills in Java or Golang or Python and ability to contribute high-quality production code, reviews, tests, and debugging in complex distributed environments.
- Strong expertise with Kubernetes, Docker, cloud-native infrastructure, service-to-service communication, scalability, fault tolerance, observability, and performance analysis.
- Experience defining SLIs/SLOs, production readiness criteria, incident response practices, monitoring, tracing, experiments, and reliability programs for AI or distributed systems.
- Software Estimation: Demonstrated ability to provide accurate software effort and complexity estimates for project planning and scheduling.
- Agile Methodologies: Demonstrated ability to use agile methodologies to drive continuous improvement and product delivery
- Excellent written and verbal communication, with demonstrated ability to lead technical direction, resolve ambiguity, and influence senior stakeholders.
- Experience with large scale cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle Cloud).
- Practical experience with orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, LlamaIndex, or similar ecosystems.
- Deep understanding of LLM application patterns, including prompt design, structured outputs, function/tool calling, context management, RAG, memory, tool safety, and evaluation.
- Experience using AI-assisted software development tools such as Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or similar systems in large-scale engineering environments.
- Experience in enterprise, cloud infrastructure, regulated, security-sensitive, or mission-critical environments.
The Principal Core Infrastructure Software Engineer is a Senior Staff-level, hands-on technical leadership role responsible for defining, building, and operating next-generation AI systems on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This person will set architecture and engineering direction for production-grade cloud distributed systems, agentic AI platforms, autonomous workflows, scalable inference infrastructure, and enterprise AI applications used in large-scale, business-critical environments.
This role requires a proven engineer who can translate ambiguous product and platform goals into durable technical strategy, lead multi-team execution without direct authority, and remain deeply hands-on in design, code, reviews, operations, and incident follow-up. The ideal candidate combines deep distributed systems experience with practical AI-native engineering, including orchestration of LLMs, tools, APIs, memory, retrieval, evaluation, guardrails, and cloud services. The expectation is to ship, scale, and operate reliable, secure, observable, and cost-aware AI platform systems while raising the technical bar for engineers across the organization.
- 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.
- Design, architect, and deliver scalable agentic AI systems capable of reasoning, planning, tool use, workflow execution, multi-step task orchestration, and safe human-in-the-loop escalation.
- Define scalability, performance, availability, and durability requirements for owned services and components.
- Build fault-tolerant systems that support redundancy, replication, automated failover, and in-service upgrades.
- Optimize services for high-throughput, low-latency, and large-scale cloud workloads.
- Design systems that handle network unreliability, service disruptions, and partition scenarios while meeting SLOs.
- Establish telemetry, KPIs, dashboards, and alerts to monitor service health, performance, reliability, and customer impact.
- Drive performance testing, load testing, fault injection, brownout testing, and other validation strategies to ensure correctness and resiliency.
- Implement secure infrastructure controls for multi-tenant cloud environments, including access controls, encryption, and remediation of security gaps.
- Develop automation, Infrastructure as Code, and deployment tooling to support safe patching, updates, rollbacks, and operational recovery.
- Take ownership of production operations, including troubleshooting, incident response, root cause analysis, and ongoing service improvements.
- Strengthen operational readiness by improving runbooks, monitoring, change management, deployment safety, and recovery processes.
- Collaborate with partner teams across OCI to align architecture, dependencies, and service requirements.
- Mentor engineers, review technical designs, guide implementation decisions, and help raise the engineering bar across the team.
Required Qualifications:
- Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, AI/ML, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 6-10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant ownership of production systems; or equivalent experience demonstrating Senior Staff / Principal-level impact.
- Deep experience designing, building, and operating high-scale distributed systems, cloud services, infrastructure platforms, or AI/ML platform services.
- Strong programming skills in Java or Golang or Python and ability to contribute high-quality production code, reviews, tests, and debugging in complex distributed environments.
- Strong expertise with Kubernetes, Docker, cloud-native infrastructure, service-to-service communication, scalability, fault tolerance, observability, and performance analysis.
- Experience defining SLIs/SLOs, production readiness criteria, incident response practices, monitoring, tracing, experiments, and reliability programs for AI or distributed systems.
- Software Estimation: Demonstrated ability to provide accurate software effort and complexity estimates for project planning and scheduling.
- Agile Methodologies: Demonstrated ability to use agile methodologies to drive continuous improvement and product delivery
- Excellent written and verbal communication, with demonstrated ability to lead technical direction, resolve ambiguity, and influence senior stakeholders.
- Experience with large scale cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle Cloud).
- Practical experience with orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, LlamaIndex, or similar ecosystems.
- Deep understanding of LLM application patterns, including prompt design, structured outputs, function/tool calling, context management, RAG, memory, tool safety, and evaluation.
- Experience using AI-assisted software development tools such as Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or similar systems in large-scale engineering environments.
- Experience in enterprise, cloud infrastructure, regulated, security-sensitive, or mission-critical environments.
See All 32 Principal Engineer Jobs in Nashville
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Find Principal Engineer JobsPrincipal Engineer Job Market in Nashville
Who's Hiring
- Oracle26
- Verizon1
- Starbucks1
- Amazon1
- OHM Advisors1
Top Industries Hiring
- Technology & Software23
- Retail1
- Telecommunications1
- E-Commerce & Online Marketplaces1
Principal Engineer Jobs in Nashville: Frequently Asked Questions
How do I get a principal engineer job in Nashville?
Focus your search on Nashville's healthcare IT corridor, where companies building clinical platforms and health data infrastructure hire principal engineers consistently, and on the enterprise software and fintech firms clustered in The Gulch and Cool Springs. Candidates who can show end-to-end system ownership, cross-functional technical leadership, and experience scaling distributed teams stand out most in Nashville's market.
Which companies hire principal engineers in Nashville?
Nashville principal engineer roles are posted by Oracle, Verizon, and Starbucks and others right now, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of July 2026. Nashville's employer mix includes large health systems and their technology arms, regional financial services firms, and a growing cluster of SaaS companies that have relocated or expanded here over the past several years.
Are there remote principal engineer jobs in Nashville?
Yes, though availability depends heavily on the role: principal engineers in software architecture and data systems work remotely far more often than those tied to hardware, lab, or plant environments. About 0% of principal engineer openings tied to Nashville are remote or hybrid as of July 2026. Software-focused principal engineer roles at Nashville's health tech and SaaS companies are the most likely to offer fully remote or flexible arrangements.
How can I get a principal engineer job in Nashville with little or no experience?
The most realistic path in Nashville is to enter through a senior engineer role at one of the city's mid-size health tech or SaaS companies, where internal promotion to principal is common as those teams scale. Nashville's growing startup scene in The Gulch and East Nashville also offers earlier responsibility than large enterprises would. Building a portfolio that shows system design decisions, not just implementation, is what moves candidates from senior to principal consideration locally.
Which industries hire the most principal engineers in Nashville?
Nashville principal engineer roles concentrate in Technology & Software, Retail, and Telecommunications, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of July 2026. Nashville's position as a national hub for healthcare companies, combined with its expanding fintech and logistics technology presence, drives consistent principal engineer demand across those sectors.
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See All 32 Principal Engineer Jobs in Nashville
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