About The Role

OCI Container Instances is OCI's managed serverless container offering. It enables customers to deploy, operate, and scale containerized workloads without managing a container-orchestration platform, while integrating with OCI Compute, Networking, Storage, Identity, Security, Observability, and developer services.

We are seeking a **Principal Platform Software Engineer (IC4)** to build reliable systems at the intersection of Linux, virtualization, container runtimes, and public-cloud infrastructure. This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who can move comfortably from production Java code to Linux internals, container isolation, hypervisor and guest behavior, image and package pipelines, performance diagnosis, secure rollout, and operational ownership.

As part of the Container Instances Data Plane team, you will design, develop, test, deploy, and operate software that provisions, upgrades, and manages containers across OCI regions. You will work on Linux hypervisor and guest images, lifecycle-management components, container runtimes, QEMU/KVM-based virtualization, systemd, networking, storage, security, and automated image delivery. You will own substantial components end to end and help shape technical direction, reliability, scalability, and customer experience.

## Required Qualifications

BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Approximately 6+ years of relevant production software or systems-engineering experience, or demonstrably equivalent IC4-level scope.
Strong production programming experience with **Java 17 or later**.
Strong hands-on Linux systems engineering and kernel-level debugging, including substantial understanding of processes, services, namespaces, cgroups, systemd, networking, storage, and operating-system behavior.
Deep container engineering beyond application-level use: experience building and troubleshooting container images and working with runtime or isolation concepts such as Docker/OCI containers, containerd, runc, or CRI-O.
Strong bash/shell scripting and low-level troubleshooting skills.
Strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, operating systems, networking, distributed systems, testing, and software design.
Production experience with at least one public cloud.
Experience building or operating highly available production services, including monitoring, incident response, on-call participation, and operational improvement.
Experience with automated testing, CI/CD, release automation, and Infrastructure as Code; Terraform experience is expected for this role.
Ability to diagnose complex failures across multiple layers and communicate evidence, tradeoffs, and proposed solutions clearly.
Strong ownership, collaboration, documentation, and engineering judgment.
Ability to use modern engineering tools, including AI-assisted development tools where appropriate, while preserving code quality, security, review discipline, and independent technical judgment.

## Preferred Qualifications

Java 25, modern Java concurrency, JVM internals, profiling, garbage collection, tuning, or performance optimization.
Hands-on QEMU/KVM experience, including VM lifecycle, performance profiling, troubleshooting, and virtio devices such as virtio-net, virtio-scsi, or vsock.
Go or Rust systems programming; C experience is also useful for low-level platform work.
Direct kernel patch, module, driver, eBPF, scheduler, or other kernel-development experience.
Linux image creation and customization using technologies such as qcow2, RPM, DNF/YUM, package repositories, boot configuration, or OSTree.
Advanced cgroup v1/v2, CPU quota/weight, cpuset, NUMA, scheduler, performance, and resource-contention analysis.
Linux networking experience with bridges, veth pairs, network namespaces, routing, TCP/IP, packet capture, and traffic diagnosis.
Storage and security experience with LUKS/dm-crypt, LVM, iSCSI, virtual disks, encryption, vulnerability remediation, or secure bootstrapping.
Experience with debugging and profiling tools such as strace, tcpdump, Wireshark, gdb, perf, core-dump analysis, or equivalent tools.
ARM/aarch64 and x86 multi-architecture package, image, test, or deployment pipelines.
OCI experience, particularly with networking, storage, identity, telemetry, regional deployment, and infrastructure lifecycle APIs.

As a Principal Platform Software Engineer on the Container Instances Data Plane team, you will

Design, build, and maintain production-grade Linux hypervisor and guest operating-system images used to run containerized workloads.
Develop automated processes for creating, customizing, validating, publishing, and safely rolling out Linux images, including formats such as qcow2.
Customize Linux at the kernel-facing, systemd, networking, storage, security, package-management, and boot layers to meet platform requirements.
Build and maintain RPM packages, repositories, image-composition workflows, and release manifests using DNF/YUM and, where applicable, OSTree-based technologies.
Develop and maintain lifecycle-management and platform components in Java, Go, and shell scripting.
Integrate and troubleshoot container runtimes and OCI container behavior, including containerd/runc or related technologies.
Design and optimize virtualization using QEMU/KVM and paravirtualized networking, storage, and host/guest communication devices.
Improve performance, boot time, reliability, resource utilization, isolation, and scalability across virtualized Linux environments.
Troubleshoot complex issues across the Linux kernel, virtualization stack, container runtimes, networking, storage, security, and distributed cloud infrastructure.
Design and execute functional, integration, performance, regression, failure, and security testing.
Build CI/CD and image-release pipelines that automate package integration, vulnerability remediation, security validation, qualification, canary deployment, compatibility checks, monitoring, rollback, and release evidence.
Integrate the data plane with OCI services and APIs for networking, storage, identity, telemetry, and infrastructure lifecycle management.
Automate infrastructure provisioning and validation using Terraform and other approved Infrastructure as Code practices.
Coordinate safe releases across large hypervisor fleets and multiple global regions, including staged deployment and operational readiness.
Participate in on-call and incident response, drive root-cause analysis, and improve monitoring, runbooks, and service reliability.
Produce clear design documents, operational procedures, troubleshooting guides, and architectural decisions; explain technical tradeoffs and influence engineering partners across teams.
Mentor engineers and provide technical leadership through design quality, reviews, debugging, and end-to-end ownership rather than through people-management responsibility.