Principal Core Infrastructure Engineer

Build the hypervisor powering OCI—pioneer new hardware, live migration, and hardened cloud security at global scale.

The Virtual Machine Data Plane team builds the hypervisor technology that powers Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s virtual machines. We enable secure, high-performance, multi-tenant compute: allowing a single physical host to safely and efficiently run many independent customer VMs. You’ll work at the intersection of low-level systems software, modern server hardware, virtualization, and cloud-scale reliability. Our work directly shapes how customers experience OCI Compute—from launching an instance to keeping it secure and available through infrastructure maintenance. What you’ll work on: Enable new compute platforms across Intel, AMD, and Arm architectures. Develop virtualization and hypervisor capabilities that deliver strong performance, isolation, and reliability for multi-tenant workloads. Build live-migration technology that transparently moves a running VM between physical hosts, allowing critical infrastructure maintenance with minimal disruption—typically only a pause measured in tens of milliseconds. Strengthen the security foundation of cloud compute through capabilities such as Shielded Instances and Confidential Computing Collaborate with hardware vendors and partner engineering teams to bring new platforms and capabilities into OCI at scale. Solve difficult systems problems involving CPU virtualization, memory management, device emulation, networking, storage, observability, and fault recovery. We’re looking for engineers who enjoy working close to the hardware and are excited by problems where correctness, performance, security, and availability all matter. Experience with systems programming, operating systems, virtualization, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, or performance engineering is especially relevant. This is a team where you can help define the infrastructure layer beneath millions of workloads—and make cloud compute more capable, resilient, and secure.

Design and build hypervisor and host-side software that securely runs and isolates multi-tenant virtual machines at cloud scale. Enable and optimize OCI compute platforms across emerging Intel, AMD, and Arm hardware, with a focus on performance, scalability, and reliability. Develop virtualization capabilities such as live migration, allowing maintenance and hardware lifecycle events with minimal customer disruption. Design fault-tolerant systems that support in-service updates, automatic recovery, safe rollback, and high availability. Investigate and resolve complex issues spanning hypervisor software, guest VMs, host operating systems, hardware, networking, and storage. Build automated validation, performance, stress, fault-injection, and compatibility testing for new platforms and features. Instrument services with telemetry, dashboards, alerts, and runbooks to detect, diagnose, and recover from operational issues. Participate in an operational support rotation, incident response, root-cause analysis, and follow-up improvements. Build security capabilities that strengthen workload isolation and platform integrity, including hardened firmware and protections such as Shielded Instances. Develop tooling and automation for deployment, maintenance, troubleshooting, configuration management, and safe rollout of hypervisor changes. Collaborate with hardware vendors and partner engineering teams to qualify new server platforms and deliver end-to-end compute features. Document designs, operational procedures, and technical decisions; share knowledge and improve team engineering practices. Plan and deliver work with increasing independence, balancing feature development, operational commitments, technical debt, and customer impact.

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: $114,600 to $234,600 per annum. May be eligible for bonus, equity, and compensation deferral. 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. As part of Oracle's onboarding process and consistent with applicable law, US-based employees are required to complete identity verification, which involves the collection and processing of their biometric information. Accommodations to this requirement may be granted following an individualized assessment.