Principal Core Infrastructure Engineer

** Job Description*
* The role will provide technical leadership for the architecture, design, and evolution of OCI's high-performance virtual networking dataplane. This role is responsible for shaping the systems and engineering direction behind foundational networking capabilities, including packet processing, routing, network address translation, virtual network gateways, traffic management, and security-policy enforcement in a highly scalable, multi-tenant cloud environment.

The engineer will define and drive the architecture for dataplane services that must deliver high throughput, low latency, strong tenant isolation, fault tolerance, and operational simplicity at cloud scale. They will make critical technical decisions across C/C++ systems design, concurrency, memory management, performance optimization, Linux networking, distributed control-plane integration, and fast dataplane technologies such as DPDK, VirtIO, eBPF/XDP, SR-IOV, SmartNICs, and userspace packet-processing frameworks.

This role leads complex initiatives from early technical strategy through architecture, implementation, testing, rollout, and long-term operation. The Principal Engineer will establish design patterns and technical standards for safe, observable, recoverable services; guide the design of resilient mechanisms such as health checks, failover, graceful draining, rollback, and recovery; and ensure features can withstand failures, in-service updates, traffic spikes, and evolving customer requirements without disruption.

The Principal Engineer will also influence how the organization measures and operates dataplane health. They will drive investments in metrics, telemetry, dashboards, alarms, canaries, diagnostic tooling, automated validation, and incident learning. They will lead investigation of the most complex performance and production issues, using system and network-level evidence to identify root causes and create durable improvements.

Success in this role requires broad technical depth as well as strong cross-functional leadership. The Principal Engineer will partner with control-plane, infrastructure, security, hardware, operations, and product teams to align architecture and execution across service boundaries. They will mentor engineers, raise the quality of design and code reviews, clarify difficult technical tradeoffs, and create reusable engineering practices that improve the reliability, performance, security, and delivery velocity of OCI virtual networking.

** Responsibilities*
* ** Key Responsibilities*
* ** System Design and Architecture*
* ** Dataplane Scalability and Performance*
* + Design and implement major C and C++ features for OCI's high-performance virtual networking dataplane, including routing, NAT, network gateways, and security-policy enforcement.

+ Own complex packet-processing components that support scalable, multi-tenant cloud networking.

+ Drive performance improvements across CPU utilization, memory use, concurrency, latency, throughput, and packet-processing efficiency.

+ Apply and evolve fast dataplane technologies such as DPDK, VirtIO, Linux networking, eBPF/XDP, SR-IOV, SmartNICs, and userspace packet-processing frameworks.

+ Define and execute performance, scale, stress, and load tests; use results to identify bottlenecks and deliver measurable improvements.

+ Lead system-level design and code reviews, ensuring solutions meet expectations for performance, correctness, reliability, and maintainability.

** Reliability and Availability*
* + Design and build fault-tolerant gateway and dataplane components that remain available through host failures, network disruptions, and in-service software updates.

+ Implement resilient patterns including health checks, graceful draining,…