Lead Principal Platform Software Engineer

Join Oracle’s AI and Robotics team to define and build software platforms that bring together scientific workflows, AI, robotics, and laboratory automation in support of the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT).

Within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), we are developing shared cloud services, integration frameworks, execution infrastructure, and developer tools for AI-enabled life sciences laboratories. These capabilities help scientists and application teams develop and operate automated workflows across diverse robots, scientific instruments, and laboratory equipment.

We are seeking a Lead Principal Software Engineer to set long-term technical direction for the Robotics Automation Platform. You will lead architecture and technical delivery across services and teams, translating emerging customer requirements into reusable platform capabilities.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role combining architectural leadership with substantial implementation responsibility. You will guide principal and senior engineers, personally build foundational capabilities, and resolve complex issues across distributed services, AI infrastructure, and equipment integration.

Based in Nashville, you will collaborate closely with engineering teams in the United Kingdom and India Development Centre (IDC). UK-based colleagues will support physical equipment integration and laboratory validation, working with you on platform interfaces, simulation, diagnostics, and system verification.

We welcome experience across cloud platforms, distributed systems, AI infrastructure, robotics, industrial automation, and scientific software. Previous laboratory automation experience is valuable but is not essential.

• Define platform architecture and service boundaries across laboratory workflow orchestration, resource management, robotic fleet coordination, device integration, and local execution.

  Lead technical delivery of foundational cloud services, APIs, SDKs, integration frameworks, and developer tools.

• Establish reusable equipment capability models, adapter contracts, and secure interfaces between cloud services and laboratory systems.

• Architect shared execution infrastructure covering state management, asynchronous operations, persistence, retries, idempotency, and recovery from partial failures.

• Define infrastructure for agentic capabilities, including tool execution, context management, orchestration, evaluation, and human oversight.

• Establish clear boundaries between AI-driven decisions, deterministic execution, equipment control, and independent physical safety systems.

• Personally design, implement, test, and deploy critical platform components and reference implementations.

• Partner with product leaders, scientists, customers, and engineers to sequence investments and balance immediate customer needs with long-term platform reuse.

• Resolve architectural dependencies and guide technical delivery across Nashville, UK, and IDC teams.

• Mentor principal and senior engineers and establish consistent engineering practices across the platform.

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including sustained technical leadership for complex production platforms or distributed systems.

• Demonstrated architectural ownership across multiple services and teams, from ambiguous requirements through deployment and ongoing operation.

• Deep expertise in cloud-native distributed systems, service design, APIs, and integration frameworks.

• Strong, current programming skills in Python, Go, Java, C++, or similar languages, with evidence of personally delivering substantial production software.

• Experience building infrastructure for agentic systems, including tool integration, context and state…