Principal Database Engineer - Oracle Exadata

Principal Database Engineer, Oracle Exadata, Multi Database and AI Ready Data Platforms

Position Summary
We are seeking a highly skilled and forward looking Principal Database Engineer with deep ownership of Oracle Exadata engineered systems, enterprise Oracle database platforms, and modern cloud native databases. This role is the senior technical and platform authority responsible for architecture, engineering standards, financial stewardship, and long term evolution of the enterprise database ecosystem across Exadata based on premise platforms, hybrid models, and public cloud environments.
The ideal candidate combines hands on Oracle and Exadata expertise, strong commercial and cost management awareness, and a strategic mindset for enabling analytics, machine learning, and Generative AI at enterprise scale.

Key Responsibilities

Oracle Exadata Platform Ownership and Engineered Systems Leadership
• Serve as the primary technical owner and architect for Oracle Exadata environments across database, compute, storage, and networking
• Define Exadata platform strategy, operating models, consolidation approaches, workload placement, and growth planning
• Lead performance engineering using Smart Scan, Hybrid Columnar Compression, ASM, RAC, IORM, and resource management
• Own capacity planning, utilization optimization, and expansion strategies balancing performance, availability, and cost
• Design and govern high availability and disaster recovery architectures using RAC, Data Guard, and Maximum Availability Architecture patterns
• Establish monitoring, diagnostics, and observability standards for proactive platform health management
• Partner with infrastructure teams on lifecycle management including patching, firmware alignment, upgrades, expansion, and decommissioning

Oracle Licensing, Cost Optimization, and Commercial Governance
• Act as the technical authority for Oracle licensing strategy aligned to architecture and deployment decisions
• Optimize licensing and support costs through processor and core analysis, feature usage governance, and environment right sizing
• Partner with finance, procurement, and legal on contract negotiations, renewals, audits, and true up activities
• Establish engineering guardrails to prevent licensing risk and cost leakage across on premise and cloud environments
• Evaluate deployment alternatives including Exadata Cloud at Customer and hybrid models with detailed cost benefit analysis
• Provide executive level insight into total cost of ownership, performance tradeoffs, and long term platform sustainability

Database Architecture, Engineering, and Operations
• Serve as enterprise technical authority for Oracle and multi database platforms
• Administer and optimize Oracle databases including tuning, backup, recovery, security, and lifecycle management
• Provide expert guidance for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and other relational and NoSQL platforms
• Design and review complex SQL, schemas, and access patterns supporting mission critical applications and analytics
• Define resiliency, scaling, and data protection architectures aligned to business RTO and RPO requirements

Cloud and Hybrid Data Platforms
• Architect and support cloud database services primarily on AWS and Azure
• Lead database modernization and hybrid integration between Exadata and cloud platforms
• Establish standards for cloud database performance, cost optimization, security, and reliability
• Partner with cloud, infrastructure, and SRE teams on automation, observability, and reliability engineering

AI, Analytics, and Data Enablement
• Architect databases supporting advanced analytics, machine learning, and Generative AI workloads
• Enable AI ready data performance including high throughput, low latency, and scalable access patterns
• Support data integration, replication, and streaming using Kafka, GoldenGate, and cloud native services
• Collaborate with data engineering teams on model training, inference, and near real time analytics pipelines

Automation, Governance, and Security
• Implement database automation using scripting, DevOps and DataOps practices, and Infrastructure as Code
• Enforce data security, privacy, compliance, encryption, access control, and auditing standards
• Support responsible data and AI governance including data quality, lineage, and controlled access
• Act as senior escalation point for incidents, driving root cause analysis and long term improvements

Technical Leadership and Vendor Management
• Provide mentorship and technical leadership to database and platform engineers
• Influence architecture, platform roadmaps, and tech