Principal Software Engineer – Distributed Systems (Oracle Database Core / VOS)

Principal Software Developer Oracle Database (Virtual Operating System) About the Team

Join Oracles Virtual Operating System (VOS) team, the engineers behind the portable, high-performance platform that underpins Oracle Database across a wide range of hardware and deployment environments. Within VOS, the Inter-Process Communication (IPC) group builds the distributed communication, coordination, and execution foundations that enable Oracle RAC, Exadata, and other flagship database capabilities to scale with exceptional performance, availability, and reliability.

The team operates deep in the database stack, working across process lifecycle management, shared-memory and message-based communication, remote direct memory access (RDMA), and cluster-wide coordination. Our focus is on building infrastructure that is fast, efficient, diagnosable, and robust under extreme scale, while remaining adaptable to evolving workloads and hardware platforms.

Opportunities You Will Get

In this role, you will design and deliver foundational systems at the intersection of operating systems, networking, and distributed data processing. Your work will focus on enabling efficient, scalable data movement and coordination inside the database as below:

• Design cluster-level synchronization and coordination mechanisms using low-latency communication, atomic operations, and shared state.
• Build and integrate high-throughput, low-latency data ingestion and streaming paths into the database runtime.
• Enable efficient interoperability between the database and external data systems or execution engines through well-defined protocols and access paths.
• Optimize bulk and streaming data transfer using modern data representations and RPC mechanisms.
• Develop system-level telemetry and instrumentation to support observability, performance analysis, and operational diagnostics.
• Contribute to reliability engineering, resource efficiency, and end-to-end performance tuning across distributed, multi-process systems.

This role emphasizes ownership of complex subsystems that evolve over time and are critical to the scalability, correctness, and performance of Oracle Database. Depending on experience, scope may range from leading a core component to influencing architecture across multiple related subsystems.

Technologies You Will Use

The team works across a broad range of systems and infrastructure technologies. While specific tools evolve over time, examples include:

• Low-level networking and communication primitives such as RDMA, RoCE, and kernel-bypass I/O.
• Distributed messaging, streaming, and coordination systems.
• Data interchange formats and high-performance data transport mechanisms, including columnar representations and RPC frameworks.
• Inter-process and inter-node communication protocols.
• System instrumentation and observability frameworks.
• Operating system, runtime, and hardware-aware performance optimizations.
• Experience with technologies such as Redis, Kafka, Apache Arrow and Flight, gRPC, OpenTelemetry, or similar systems is relevant insofar as it demonstrates these underlying capabilities.

Minimum Qualifications

• BE, B.Tech, MCA, M.Tech, ME, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of relevant industry experience.
• Strong foundation in systems programming and software engineering.
• Proficiency in C; experience with C++ or Rust is a plus.
• Excellent debugging, performance analysis, and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to quickly understand complex systems and deliver high-quality solutions in a fast-paced environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in Operating Systems, Distributed Systems, Computer Networks, Databases, or Computer Architecture.
• Experience building or integrating distributed data systems, messaging platforms, or storage engines.
• Familiarity with concurrency control, synchronization, and distributed coordination patterns.
• Understanding of high-performance networking and I/O paths.
• Experience working on large, long-lived codebases with strict correctness and reliability requirements.

Why Join Us

• Work on deeply technical, high-impact systems at the core of Oracle Database.
• Influence the architecture of distributed database capabilities used by mission-critical systems worldwide.
• Collaborate with engineers solving some of the hardest problems in systems and data infrastructure.
• Grow your expertise in large-scale, performance-critical, enterprise-grade software.