Senior Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Description

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s Kubernetes Engine (OKE) team is looking for an experienced Senior Principal Site Reliability Engineer to help build and operate a Kubernetes platform at global scale.

In this hands-on technical leadership role, you will solve problems spanning distributed systems, Kubernetes, networking, cloud infrastructure, and deployment automation. You will improve how services launch in new cloud regions, validate releases, recover from failures, and use infrastructure efficiently. Your work will combine software engineering, systems expertise, and close collaboration with teams across OCI.

You will own complex initiatives from design through implementation and operational handover. Projects may include automating regional service deployments, improving release validation, planning software upgrades, strengthening cloud access controls, and eliminating recurring operational work. You will also serve as a technical escalation resource and help other engineers grow through mentoring, design reviews, and knowledge sharing.

We are looking for someone with strong Cloud Infrastructure, Linux, and networking fundamentals; experience operating production distributed systems; and the ability to build maintainable software and infrastructure automation. You should be comfortable investigating unfamiliar systems, making sound decisions about reliability and security, and bringing multiple teams together to deliver a solution.

Deep experience with Terraform, automated deployment pipelines, observability, cloud identity and access management, is expected. Experience with OCI or another major cloud platform is valuable.

This role offers the opportunity to influence service architecture and engineering practices while delivering tangible improvements: safer releases, more predictable region launches, faster recovery, and less operational toil.

Responsibilities

Key Responsibilities

Infrastructure Architecture and Capacity Management

• Lead the design and evolution of reliable, secure, and scalable infrastructure for OCI Kubernetes services.
• Plan infrastructure capacity for new region launches and service growth, addressing resource constraints, hardware differences, and availability requirements.
• Partner with software engineering teams to improve service architecture, deployment dependencies, and readiness for new cloud environments.
• Evaluate and prototype infrastructure improvements, including smaller service footprints and more efficient compute configurations.
• Identify opportunities to reduce cloud costs through rightsizing, resource lifecycle automation, and safe removal of unused infrastructure.

Incident and Service Lifecycle Management

• Lead operational readiness throughout the service lifecycle, from initial provisioning and regional deployment through upgrades and decommissioning.
• Use service health, performance, and capacity data to identify risks and prioritize engineering improvements.
• Plan and execute Kubernetes upgrades, infrastructure changes, and security updates with appropriate validation and recovery procedures.
• Improve release safety through reliable artifact publication, automated health checks, controlled rollouts, and tested rollback strategies.
• Strengthen infrastructure security through appropriate access controls, secure configuration, and sustainable remediation practices.

Automation

• Identify recurring operational work and lead automation initiatives that improve reliability, deployment speed, and engineering efficiency.
• Design, implement, and maintain infrastructure as code, deployment workflows, and tools for provisioning, monitoring, diagnosis, and remediation.
• Build repeatable region-build testing and service validation that expose configuration errors, missing dependencies, and artifact issues before deployment.
• Test complex automation for correctness, failure handling, recovery, and safe operation across environments.
• Guide engineers in designing maintainable automation and establishing clear ownership and operational documentation.

Technical Communication and Guidance

• Communicate service architecture, operational risks, capacity needs, and deployment requirements clearly to engineering teams and leadership.
• Explain the impact and tradeoffs of infrastructure and service changes, including implications for availability, security, cost, and delivery.
• Create and maintain design documents, runbooks, upgrade plans, and operational handover materials.
• Mentor engineers through technical reviews, hands-on troubleshooting, and knowledge-sharing sessions.

Troubleshooting and Resolution

• Serve as a technical escalation point for complex failures across Kubernetes control planes, management services, networking, identity, storage, and cloud infrastructure.
• Participate in on-call rotations and lead technical investigations to restore service and protect customer workloads.
• Coordinate resolution of issues spanning multiple services and teams, using evidence from logs, metrics, configuration, and source code.
• Lead root-cause analysis and post-incident reviews, documenting contributing factors and lessons learned.
• Drive corrective actions through implementation and validation to prevent recurring incidents.

Innovation and Improvement

• Identify architectural bottlenecks and improve deployment orchestration, service validation, and recovery mechanisms.
• Evaluate tools and technologies that improve infrastructure reliability and engineering productivity while meeting security requirements.
• Use operational evidence to prioritize improvements and measure their effect on deployment time, service health, resource consumption, and manual effort.
• Turn successful solutions into reusable tools and practices that benefit multiple engineering teams.

Core Responsibilities

Planning and Execution

• Own complex engineering initiatives from problem definition and design through delivery and operational handover.
• Establish milestones, track dependencies, communicate risks, and adjust plans as priorities or capacity change.
• Balance project delivery with operational responsibilities and long-term reliability improvements.

Collaboration and Partnership

• Build effective partnerships across service development, infrastructure, security, and region-build teams.
• Establish clear responsibilities and readiness criteria for shared workflows and service handovers.
• Resolve dependencies and technical disagreements through clear communication, evidence, and shared delivery goals.

Problem Solving

• Bring structure to ambiguous problems spanning multiple systems or teams.
• Investigate underlying causes, evaluate tradeoffs, and deliver durable solutions.
• Exercise sound judgment when making changes to production infrastructure and customer-facing services.

Continuous Learning

• Maintain deep expertise in Kubernetes, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and site reliability engineering.
• Apply new knowledge to improve service design and operations.
• Develop other engineers through mentoring, constructive feedback, and practical technical training.

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Qualifications

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: $110,800 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.

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