Senior Principal Software Engineer, Performance

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).