Principal Software Engineer
Oracle · Nashville, TN
$114,600–$234,600from the description
Jul 14, 2026
Nashville, TN
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual-contributor engineering role focused on architecting and building two new OCI data-plane services: a managed serverless NoSQL key-value store and a high-throughput journaling service. Day-to-day work spans deep system design, hands-on prototyping, code reviews, and cross-team technical leadership. The role suits an experienced distributed-systems engineer with a track record of delivering large-scale cloud infrastructure and mentoring senior engineers.
Staff level · 6+ years · Remote · Full-time
Advertised as Principal, but the requirements read as Staff.
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 15 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.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
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 (7)
The posting is labeled 'Career Level - IC4' (individual contributor), which at Oracle typically maps to a Principal/Staff-level IC. Despite the 'Principal'-style framing in the title and responsibilities, the actual requirements gate on only 6+ years of experience and a broad but not extraordinary skill set, which better supports a Staff-level assessment than Principal.
The role is explicitly IC (individual contributor), not a people manager, but it carries significant cross-team technical leadership, mentoring of senior engineers, and executive collaboration — placing it at the Staff band rather than Senior.
No specific work location is stated in the posting beyond 'US'; the CBSA and state fields are left blank accordingly. The compensation range is US-wide.
The degree requirement lists BS/MS/PhD 'or equivalent experience,' so no formal degree is hard-gated.
Python and Java are listed as alternatives for the programming language requirement; Python is named first and used as the primary skill name.
AWS, Azure, and GCP are listed as interchangeable cloud platform options; all three are captured as alternatives.
The role targets one of two new OCI services (a key-value/NoSQL store or a journaling service), so the primary domain is cloud infrastructure data-plane engineering.
Read the full posting
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