Principal Software Engineer Jobs in Tennessee

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Compute delivers bare metal and virtual machine instances - CPU and GPU - at global scale. We are hiring a Senior Principal Software Engineer to design, build, and operate OCI Compute control plane services, with a focus on Imaging and Container Registry.

In this role, you will lead complex technical projects and deliver secure, highly available, multi-tenant distributed services that scale across OCI regions. You will combine hands-on development with sound architectural judgment, collaborate with partner teams, and improve service reliability, performance, and operational efficiency.

In this role, you will:

• Design, implement, and operate resilient distributed services that support multi-tenancy, horizontal scaling, predictable performance, and cost efficiency.

• Lead technical projects within Imaging and Container Registry, translating requirements into designs, implementation plans, and production-ready capabilities.

• Collaborate with Compute, Storage, Networking, Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE), and OCI Functions teams to deliver platform features and resolve technical dependencies.

• Apply secure-by-default design principles, including tenant isolation, authentication, authorization, and secure image and artifact lifecycle management.

• Improve service-level objectives for availability, latency, and durability through observability, automation, capacity planning, and recovery mechanisms.

• Own features and service components throughout their lifecycle, including design, implementation, testing, deployment, on-call support, and continuous improvement.

• Investigate complex production issues, lead root cause analysis for owned components, and implement durable fixes.

• Mentor engineers through design discussions, code reviews, and troubleshooting while strengthening the team’s engineering practices.

• Contribute technical proposals and effort estimates to the service roadmap, partnering with engineering leaders and product management to prioritize customer needs.

We are looking for a hands-on engineer with strong distributed systems design and implementation experience to help build the next generation of OCI Compute services.

You will independently solve complex problems, evaluate architectural tradeoffs, and lead projects from design through production. You will remain actively involved in coding, testing, debugging, and service operations while providing technical guidance to engineers working on related components.

Success in this role requires strong ownership, clear written and verbal communication, and the ability to coordinate delivery across team boundaries. You should be comfortable presenting designs, explaining technical decisions, and balancing feature delivery with reliability, security, and maintainability.

Qualifications:

• 6+ years of software development experience, including substantial experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems.

• Strong proficiency in Java, including concurrency, API design, testing, and performance troubleshooting. Experience with Python or Scala is a plus.

• Strong knowledge of data structures, algorithms, operating systems, and networking fundamentals.

• Demonstrated understanding of distributed systems concepts, including consistency, replication, fault tolerance, idempotency, and failure recovery.

• Experience delivering highly available production services and participating in on-call support, incident response, and root cause analysis.

• Strong Linux development and troubleshooting skills.

• Experience using metrics, logs, tracing, dashboards, and actionable alarms to assess and improve service health.

• Ability to independently scope technical work, evaluate tradeoffs, and deliver improvements in reliability, performance, automation, and operational efficiency.

• BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience building cloud control planes, image management services, container registries, or artifact distribution systems.

• Familiarity with container technologies, container image formats, and image or artifact lifecycle management.

• Experience with multi-tenant architectures, regional service deployments, and storage service integrations.

• Experience implementing secure software supply chain capabilities, such as image signing or vulnerability scanning.

Collaboration & Technical Leadership:

• Take ownership of complex deliverables and work independently within agreed priorities.

• Communicate designs, risks, dependencies, and progress clearly to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.

• Build effective partnerships across teams and resolve technical disagreements constructively.

• Mentor engineers and provide practical guidance through design and code reviews.

• Exercise sound judgment when balancing customer needs, delivery timelines, and long-term service health.