Senior Principal Software Engineer

At Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), we build the future of the cloud for Enterprises as a diverse team of fellow creators and inventors. We act with the speed and attitude of a start-up, with the scale and customer-focus of the leading enterprise software company in the world.
You are the builder here. We are at the forefront of AI innovation, exploring the next generation of AI accelerators and hardware solutions. As part of our growing team, you will be involved in working on the development, optimization, and enhancement of our virtualization platforms and kernel subsystems. You will collaborate with architects, systems engineers, and DevOps teams to design and implement robust, high-performance solutions that scale across large, distributed systems.

You will be part of a team of smart, motivated, and diverse people and given the autonomy and support to do your best work. It is a dynamic and flexible workplace where you’ll belong and be encouraged.
As a Senior Principal Software Engineer / Consulting Member of Technical Staff, you will will be responsible for the evaluation, prototyping, and testing of emerging AI accelerators, including custom-designed AI chips and systems. You will work with the latest AI hardware architectures, benchmark their performance, and collaborate with software engineers to ensure tight integration with AI workloads. You’ll have a direct impact on shaping the future of AI hardware for machine learning and deep learning applications.

Career Level - IC5

Our Senior Principal engineers are also the people who can work independently and provide technical leadership to the broader organization. You should have experience developing compute hypervisor and kernel projects and operating high-scale services, and an understanding of how to make these cloud-scale services highly performant and secured. The ideal candidate will be technically strong and productive; someone who knows how to balance speed and quality with iterative and incremental improvements. You understand operational excellence and know-how to infuse a culture of being proactive within your team. You recommend and justify major changes to new and existing products and establish consensus with data-driven approaches.

• Architect, develop, and optimize state-of-the-art hypervisor technologies (e.g., KVM, Xen, or custom-built hypervisors) for high scalability and low-latency performance.
• Implement key virtualization features, including live migration, fault tolerance, and resource management in distributed environments.
• Develop, test, and maintain kernel modules, system calls, and low-level hardware drivers.
• Ensure seamless integration of virtualization technologies with host kernel subsystems to achieve optimal resource management and stability.
• Identify performance bottlenecks and work to optimize both hypervisor and kernel subsystems, focusing on CPU scheduling, memory allocation, I/O, and network throughput.
• Use profiling tools (e.g., perf, ftrace, sysstat, GDB) to diagnose and solve complex performance issues in virtualized environments.
• Work closely with security teams to implement advanced security features such as virtual machine isolation, secure boot, and hardware-level encryption.
• Address emerging threats in the virtualization space, ensuring the integrity and safety of systems in multi-tenant environments.

Basic Qualifications

• BS or MS degree in Computer Science or relevant technical field involving coding or equivalent practical experience
• 10+ years of total experience in software development
• Proven expertise in C/C++ programming with a focus on system-level programming.
• Strong understanding of the Linux Kernel architecture, kernel modules, and low-level system internals.
• Experience with hypervisor technologies (e.g., KVM, Xen, VMware) and virtual machine management.
• Solid understanding of virtualization concepts such as CPU, memory, and I/O virtualization.
• Proficiency in using performance and debugging tools (e.g., gdb, perf, ftrace, strace).
• Experience in designing and optimizing highly concurrent, distributed systems, with a focus on low-latency and high-throughput environments.
• Deep knowledge of operating systems and how they interact with hardware components (e.g., CPU, memory, and networking).

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience as technical lead on a large scale cloud service
• Hands-on experience developing and maintaining services on a public cloud platform (e.g., AWS, Azure, Oracle)
• Experience with QEMU, libvirt, or other tools used for managing virtual machines.
• Familiarity with containerization technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) and container-based virtualization.
• Contributio