Senior Principal Software Engineer, Performance - AI Infrastructure Innovation

Senior Principal Performance Engineer

OCI (Oracle Cloud) AI Infrastructure Innovation team is seeking a Senior Principal Performance Engineer to lead end-to-end performance strategy and engineering across the full stack application services, runtimes, operating systems, network, storage, and underlying hardware. You will define architecture changes, establish rigorous methodologies and tooling, and drive deep-dive investigations that unlock meaningful gains in latency, throughput, efficiency, and cost. If you thrive at troubleshooting complex distributed environments, and mentoring teams to deliver measurable improvements, this role offers the opportunity to advance the state of the art.

Responsibilities

• Lead the end-to-end performance architecture for critical services and platforms, setting strategy, standards, and best practices across applications, OS, network, storage, and hardware layers.
• Establish KPIs and benchmarking methodologies; build and maintain representative workloads and reproducible benchmarks.
• Drive systemic improvements to service and data-plane architectures.
• Design and build tooling for profiling, tracing, and telemetry with clear, actionable insights.
• Cross-organizational leadership to ensure performance is designed-in, observable, and consistent at scale.
• Mentor engineers, provide technical leadership and reviews, and influence multi-year roadmap and technical standards.

Qualifications

• Required: Expertise in systems performance across application, OS, network, storage, and hardware.
• Expertise in operating system and network stack internals (Linux kernels, scheduling, memory/IO subsystems, TCP/IP).
• Strong software engineering background with hands-on experience with performance profiling and observability.
• Ability to write and reason about performant code at a low level (e.g., C, raw sockets, CPU/vector instructions, memory/cache optimization).
• Familiarity with high-performance IO paths; understanding of cross-region networking and latency trade-offs.
• BS/MS in Computer Science, Electrical/Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience; proven technical leadership and mentoring.
• Preferred: Expertise in virtualization/containers. Java performance experience: JVM/JIT/GC internals, JFR/async-profiler, and benchmarking. Low-level engineering skills in one or more of C/C++/Rust/Go, with demonstrated ability to analyze instruction-level hotspots, memory/cache behavior, and concurrency. Database or storage performance specialization (query execution, indexing, IO path optimization).

Disclaimer

Certain US customer or client-facing roles may be required to comply with applicable requirements, such as immunization and occupational health mandates. Range and benefit information provided in this posting are specific to the stated locations only US: Hiring Range in USD from: $96,800 to $251,600 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. Oracle US offers a comprehensive benefits package which includes the following: Medical, dental, and vision insurance, including expert medical opinion; Short term disability and long term disability; Life insurance and AD&D Supplemental life insurance (Employee/Spouse/Child); Health care and dependent care Flexible Spending Accounts; Pre-tax commuter and parking benefits; 401(k) Savings and Investment Plan with company match; Paid time off: Flexible Vacation is provided to all eligible employees assigned to a salaried (non-overtime eligible) position. Accrued Vacation is provided to all other employees eligible for vacation benefits. For employees working at least 35 hours per week, the vacation accrual rate is 13 days annually for the first three years of employment and 18 days annually for subsequent years of employment. Vacation accrual is prorated for employees working between 20 and 34 hours per week. Employees working fewer than 20 hours per week are not eligible for vacation. 11 paid holidays; Paid sick leave: 72 hours of paid sick leave upon date of hire. Refreshes each calendar year. Unused balance will carry over each year up to a maximum cap of 112 hours. Paid parental leave; Adoption assistance; Employee Stock Purchase Plan; Financial planning and group legal; Voluntary benefits including auto, homeowner and pet insurance.