Senior Principal Software Engineer
Oracle · Richmond, VA
$135,200–$306,400from the description
Jul 7, 2026
Richmond, VA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual-contributor engineering role focused on building and leading a validation framework for distributed database infrastructure that underpins critical cloud control-plane services. Day-to-day work spans designing fault-injection and high-availability testing systems, automating large-scale workload generation, ensuring data consistency across failover and recovery scenarios, and collaborating with database and infrastructure teams on reliability strategy. Suits a deeply experienced engineer comfortable operating across distributed systems, architecture, and cross-organizational technical leadership.
Senior level · 10+ years · Remote · Full-time
Advertised as Principal, but the requirements read as Senior.
Posted 8 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (5)
The role is titled 'Senior Principal Engineer' (Oracle career level IC5), which maps to advertised Principal; however, the actual scope — while broad and cross-organizational — is characteristic of a very senior individual contributor rather than a true org-wide Principal/Distinguished/Fellow, so seniority is assessed as Senior.
The SOC classification is a close call: the role centers on designing and building a large-scale validation framework (engineering/development work, pointing to 15-1252), but has a strong QA/reliability-validation flavor (15-1253). 15-1252 is chosen as primary because the JD emphasizes designing and developing systems, not just testing.
No specific programming languages, cloud platforms, or named database products are hard-gated in the requirements text; the skills listed reflect the concrete technical domains explicitly called out as responsibilities.
The 10+ years figure appears inline within the responsibilities list rather than in a separate qualifications section, but is stated with firm language ('10+ years of relevant engineering… experience') and is treated as the role-level experience gate.
Ignored 2 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): database engineering, root cause analysis.
Read the full posting
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