Architect, Lightweight Infrastructure

Business Overview
JOB DESCRIPTION
This organization within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) addresses two core domains: the development of data plane primitives and the creation of a centralized service platform for infrastructure management. The team tackles complex challenges in distributed systems and state persistence, providing high-throughput solutions to support a rapidly expanding global cloud footprint. Core priorities include enhancing efficiency in infrastructure management and reducing engineering and hardware costs by establishing a unified platform leveraging cutting-edge hypervisor and virtualization technologies.

About The Role
This role reports directly to SVP, Lucas Kreger, the technical advisor for OCI. You'll collaborate closely with lead engineers, senior architects, and business leaders to build foundational platform components that enable the next generation of cloud infrastructure. As an Architect of Lightweight Serverless Infrastructure, you'll play a key role in designing, building, and delivering next-generation infrastructure systems to support high-performance, secure, and scalable cloud-native workloads. You'll lead architectural direction while remaining deeply engaged in the hands-on development and integration of a robust cluster management system. A critical part of the role includes developing and operationalizing a virtualization and hypervisor strategy to support OCI's centralized infrastructure platform. While not responsible for building a new hypervisor from scratch, you'll evaluate available solutions, guide integration, and optimize them to support secure multi-tenancy, efficient workload isolation, and performance at global cloud scale.

Responsibilities
Key Responsibilities

• Lead the architectural design and integration of a lightweight, scalable, and secure infrastructure platform that supports cloud-native and serverless workloads
• Work across multiple domains-virtualization, Linux internals, container networking (CNI), cloud virtual networking, distributed storage, security, workload orchestration, and identity-to create robust infrastructure primitives with a low dependency posture
• Evaluate, customize, and optimize hypervisor and virtualization technologies to support secure workload isolation and efficient multitenancy
• Develop and implement system components that solve challenges in distributed systems and state persistence across high-throughput data plane services
• Guide platform strategy by staying hands-on during early development phases, and transition into broader leadership, mentoring, and strategic planning
• Collaborate with senior engineers and product leadership to define and evolve the virtualization, container runtime, and orchestration layers of OCI infrastructure
• Create guardrails, operational best practices, and platform reliability strategies to support global expansion and scale
• Monitor advancements in virtualization, kernel-level networking, and distributed orchestration to inform long-term technical direction

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in engineering or a related field
• Deep expertise in virtualization platforms and hypervisor technologies, including evaluation, tuning, and optimization
• Significant experience developing or integrating container runtimes and strong familiarity with container networking standards such as CNI
• Advanced knowledge of low-level system programming (C++, Rust, GoLang),and systems-level debugging
• Background in building and operating scalable, distributed systems and infrastructure platforms
• Deep understanding of Linux internals, Linux networking, and resource management technologies
• Prior involvement in designing and implementing large-scale cluster orchestration systems or in-house infrastructure management tools
• Experience with lightweight virtualization technologies suitable for serverless environments

Preferred Qualifications

• Extensive experience developing and operating services on public clouds such as Oracle Cloud, AWS, or Azure
• Strong understanding of cloud virtual networking, identity management, and observability systems
• Hands-on experience with eBPF for programmable kernel-level networking and security (e.g., via Cilium, Envoy)
• In-depth knowledge of Linux virtualization technologies such as KVM, QEMU, LXC, libvirt, and cgroups
• Exposure to modern cluster management and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes or in-house equivalents
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional teams and influence platform direction through technical depth and practical experience

Qualifications
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: $161,700 - $338,500 per year. May be eligible for bonus, equity, and compensation deferral.

Oracle maintains broad salary ranges for its roles in order to