Lead Principal Systems Software Engineer

Description

We are responsible for the Virtual Machine Instance platforms within OCI Compute. We deliver solutions for general-purpose, confidential, and specialized computing workloads across both x86 and ARM architectures. Our team owns the full lifecycle — from launching new VM offerings to maintaining and optimizing production systems — enabling OCI to meet the evolving needs of enterprise and cloud-native customers. We are continually pushing the boundaries of virtualization technology to fulfill our mission of providing customers with highly performant, always-available, and elastic virtual machines.

Responsibilities

Role Summary:

As a Lead Principal Member of Technical Staff, you will lead software development efforts for key features within Oracle Compute's service offerings. This role combines deep hands-on engineering expertise with technical leadership, focusing on the design, development, and operation of large-scale, highly available cloud services. The ideal candidate will mentor team members, drive high-priority initiatives, and contribute to the definition of engineering standards and best practices across the organization.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own the software design and development for major components of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's Virtual Machine platform, building new solutions across the virtualization software stack.
• Drive operational excellence by defining and applying best practices to improve the quality, reliability, and performance of the hypervisor and virtual machine platform.
• Perform deep dives across the stack — from low-level Linux systems to high-level distributed system interactions — to identify root causes and ensure system resilience and fault tolerance.

Basic Qualifications:

• 10+ years of software development experience in system-level engineering.
• 5+ years of experience with OS kernel internals (e.g., memory management, device drivers, or kernel subsystems).
• 5+ years of experience with virtualization technologies (e.g., QEMU/KVM, Hyper-V, ESX).
• Proficiency in at least two of the following programming languages: C, C++, Rust, Java, or C#.
• Strong knowledge of data structures, algorithms, and operating systems.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with public cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, OCI, GCP).
• Experience with Quality Assurance for cloud infrastructure.
• Experience with GPU VMs.
• Experience with SmartNICs, SR-IOV/VFIO, and live migration technologies.
• Experience with TPM and confidential computing.
• Experience with system performance analysis and tuning.
• Master’s degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.