Principal Site Reliability Engineer - Exadata Cloud Service
Job Description
Are you interested in solving the complex challenges involved in building and operating large-scale, distributed cloud infrastructure?
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is developing the next generation of cloud technologies operating in highly available, scalable, secure, distributed, and multi-tenant environments. Our mission is to provide customers with an enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure platform that delivers exceptional reliability, scalability, security, and performance for mission-critical databases, applications, and workloads.
Learn more about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure at:
https://cloud.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure
About the Role
Oracle is building and expanding its next-generation Platform as a Service cloud offering and the support experience required to operate them at global scale. As our cloud services grow, we are expanding our team of highly skilled, customer-focused Site Reliability Engineers.
As a Principal Site Reliability Engineer, you will help operate, support, and improve Oracle Exadata Cloud Service within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. You will work at the intersection of software engineering, database engineering, systems administration, cloud infrastructure, automation, artificial intelligence, and production operations. Oracle Exadata is a full-stack engineered system designed to improve the performance, scalability, security, and availability of Oracle Database workloads. It includes specialized capabilities engineered with Oracle Database to accelerate online transaction processing, analytics, consolidation, and machine learning workloads.
In this role, you will support highly complex Exadata environments, lead the resolution of critical production issues, develop software and automation, improve service observability, and influence the architecture and operational readiness of new service capabilities. You will also serve as a technical leader within the organization. You will mentor engineers, establish engineering standards, lead cross-functional initiatives, and represent the voice of the customer to product development, service engineering, and architecture teams.
This position is integral to the reliability of the Exadata Cloud Service platform and to the success of Oracle’s customer relationships.
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, test, and deliver software and automation that improve the availability, scalability, latency, security, operability, and efficiency of Oracle Database as a Service offering.
- Lead the investigation and resolution of complex technical issues spanning Exadata Cloud Service, Autonomous Database, Oracle Database, operating systems, virtualization, storage, networking, and cloud infrastructure.
- Coordinate response to high-severity incidents, including technical diagnosis, mitigation, stakeholder communication, recovery, and post-incident review.
- Perform detailed root-cause analysis and develop corrective and preventive solutions that reduce the likelihood and impact of recurrence.
- Build automation to eliminate repetitive operational work, reduce human error, accelerate incident response, and improve fleet-management efficiency.
- Apply AI-assisted engineering and operations techniques to improve anomaly detection, incident correlation, troubleshooting, knowledge retrieval, capacity forecasting, and operational decision-making.
- Evaluate and integrate generative AI, machine learning, and large language model capabilities into appropriate SRE workflows while maintaining security, privacy, accuracy, and human oversight.
- Develop tools that use operational telemetry, logs, metrics, traces, events, and historical incident data to identify patterns and provide actionable insights.
- Define, implement, and continuously improve service-level indicators, service-level objectives, error budgets, alerts, dashboards, and operational health metrics.
- Improve monitoring and observability across distributed database and infrastructure services.
- Participate in the architecture, design, implementation, and operational-readiness review of large-scale distributed DBaaS features.
- Conduct research, prototyping, and proof-of-concept development for new service capabilities, reliability improvements, automation frameworks, and AI-enabled operational tools.
- Act as a trusted technical advisor to customers and internal stakeholders, helping solve complex database, infrastructure, cloud, and DevOps challenges.
- Create and deliver best-practice recommendations, sample code, runbooks, troubleshooting guides, technical documentation, and operational procedures.
- Contribute to making Oracle’s cloud infrastructure simple, reliable, secure, and easy to operate.
- Participate in capacity planning, demand forecasting, performance analysis, workload characterization, and system tuning.
- Support system provisioning, patching, upgrades, maintenance, and lifecycle-management activities.
- Review service and software designs for reliability, resilience, scalability, diagnosability, and operational sustainability.
- Partner with development teams to improve product quality, supportability, automation, and customer experience.
- Influence product roadmaps by translating operational findings and customer feedback into engineering requirements.
- Mentor engineers and provide technical leadership during complex projects, incidents, and architectural discussions.
- Establish and promote standard engineering practices, operational procedures, and reliability principles across the organization.
- Participate in an on-call rotation and provide escalation support for critical production incidents.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, Management Information Systems, or another relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Typically, 8 or more years of experience in software engineering, site reliability engineering, systems engineering, database engineering, cloud operations, system administration, or a related technical discipline.
- Advanced programming and scripting skills using Python, Shell, or Perl.
- Ability to design, develop, troubleshoot, and maintain production-quality software and automation.
- Strong Linux systems engineering experience and a detailed understanding of operating-system concepts, including processes, memory, storage, I/O, filesystems, networking, performance, and kernel behavior.
- Experience building, operating, and troubleshooting virtualized or containerized systems using technologies such as KVM, Oracle VM, Docker, or similar platforms.
- Ability to read, analyze, and troubleshoot source code across multiple components and technology layers.
- Demonstrated experience diagnosing complex software, database, operating-system, storage, and networking issues.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud-computing concepts, high-availability architectures, fault tolerance, scalability, and multi-tenant platforms.
- Experience designing or operating highly available services governed by strict service-level objectives or service-level agreements.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, including the ability to isolate root causes across complex, interdependent systems.
- Experience developing monitoring, observability, alerting, or operational telemetry solutions.
- Experience automating production operations, incident response, system maintenance, or fleet-management activities.
- Proven ability to learn unfamiliar technical domains quickly and transfer that knowledge to others.
- Understanding of cloud networking concepts, including virtual cloud networks, security lists, network security groups, route tables, gateways, private connectivity, and network segmentation.
- Knowledge of network security principles, including encryption in transit, TLS, certificate management, access controls, and secure network architecture.
- Strong understanding of TCP/IP networking, routing, switching, DNS, DHCP, VLANs, subnets, firewalls, load balancers, proxies, and network address translation.
- Experience troubleshooting complex network connectivity, latency, packet loss, throughput, and name-resolution issues across distributed cloud environments.
- Strong verbal and written communication skills.
- Ability to communicate complex technical findings clearly to engineering teams, leadership, customers, and other stakeholders.
- Demonstrated technical leadership, sound judgment, and the ability to operate effectively during high-pressure production incidents.
AI and Machine Learning Expectations
- Working knowledge of artificial intelligence, machine learning, generative AI, and large language model concepts.
- Experience using AI-assisted development tools to improve coding, testing, debugging, documentation, or operational analysis.
- Ability to identify practical and responsible uses of AI within site reliability engineering and cloud operations.
- Understanding of retrieval-augmented generation, prompt design, model evaluation, embeddings, vector search, or AI agent workflows.
- Ability to integrate AI or machine learning services through APIs, software development kits, or cloud-native services.
- Experience analyzing operational data for anomaly detection, event correlation, failure prediction, capacity forecasting, or incident classification.
- Understanding of the limitations and risks of AI-generated outputs, including hallucination, data leakage, prompt injection, model bias, non-determinism, and insufficient explainability.
- Ability to design AI-assisted operational workflows with appropriate validation, auditability, access controls, security protections, and human approval mechanisms.
- Commitment to using AI responsibly and in accordance with Oracle security, privacy, intellectual-property, and data-governance requirements.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with Oracle Database technologies, including Oracle Real Application Clusters, Data Guard, Oracle Grid Infrastructure, Clusterware, Automatic Storage Management, and Recovery Manager.
- Significant experience with Oracle Exadata or Exadata Cloud Service.
- Experience supporting Autonomous Database or other Oracle Database as a Service offering.
- Experience with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services, APIs, software development kits, command-line interfaces, and operational tooling.
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code and configuration-management technologies.
- Experience with Kubernetes, containers, and cloud-native service architectures.
- Programming experience with Java, C, or C++.
- Experience working in cloud technical support, production engineering, network operations centers, service operations, or similar environments.
- Experience developing or operating AI-enabled systems, machine learning pipelines, semantic-search platforms, copilots, or intelligent automation.
- Knowledge of MLOps, model monitoring, AI observability, and model-lifecycle-management practices.
- Experience building secure automation for regulated, mission-critical, or customer-facing environments.
- Master’s degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, or a related discipline.
Leadership and Impact
As a Principal Site Reliability Engineer, you will be expected to operate with a high degree of independence and technical judgment. The work is frequently non-routine and may involve highly complex, business-critical systems.
You will take an active role in defining and evolving engineering standards, operational practices, service architecture, and reliability strategy. You will lead initiatives that span multiple teams and technical domains, guide the resolution of critical incidents, and influence the long-term direction of Exadata Cloud Service operations.
Success in this role requires deep technical expertise, strong customer focus, disciplined operational execution, and the ability to transform recurring operational challenges into scalable engineering solutions.
Disclaimer:
Certain U.S. based or U.S. customer or client-facing roles may be required to comply with applicable requirements, such as immunization/occupational health mandates, and/or drug testing requirements.
Range and benefit information provided in this posting are specific to the stated locations only
US: Hiring Range in USD from: $84,900 to $209,500 per annum. May be eligible for bonus and equity.
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:
1. Medical, dental, and vision insurance, including expert medical opinion
2. Short term disability and long term disability
3. Life insurance and AD&D
4. Supplemental life insurance (Employee/Spouse/Child)
5. Health care and dependent care Flexible Spending Accounts
6. Pre-tax commuter and parking benefits
7. 401(k) Savings and Investment Plan with company match
8. 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.
9. 11 paid holidays
10. 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.
11. Paid parental leave
12. Adoption assistance
13. Employee Stock Purchase Plan
14. Financial planning and group legal
15. Voluntary benefits including auto, homeowner and pet insurance
The role will generally accept applications for at least three calendar days from the posting date or as long as the job remains posted.
Career Level - IC4