Lead Principal Core Infrastructure Engineer at Oracle
Seattle, WA
$146,300–$306,400from the description
Jun 30, 2026
Seattle, WA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual-contributor role on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's Virtual Machine Data Plane team, focused on designing and building the low-level virtualization stack — hypervisors, CPU/GPU/NVMe virtualization — that underpins OCI's compute platform. The work spans large-scale distributed systems, performance optimization, and architectural leadership, with an expectation of mentoring engineers and driving major platform capabilities.
Senior level · 8+ years · National · Full-time
Advertised as Principal, but the requirements read as Senior.
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
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
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 (6)
The job title is 'Lead Principal Core Infrastructure Engineer' (IC5 career level), but the requirements — 8+ years of experience and strong programming skills — are consistent with a Senior individual contributor, not a true Principal/org-wide authority. Seniority is assessed as Senior accordingly.
Java, Rust, and Go are presented as interchangeable options ('proficiency in Java, Rust, or Go'); Java is listed first and used as the primary skill name with Rust and Go as alternatives.
Virtualization and hypervisor experience are strongly implied as core to the role (the team builds hypervisors and the VM data plane) but are framed as interests/passions rather than explicit hard gates in a requirements section; marked as required given the clear centrality to the role.
Distributed systems experience is implied as a hard gate by the 8+ years operating large-scale distributed Linux systems requirement.
ChatGPT and Codex experience are explicitly called out as 'a plus' and are therefore preferred, not required.
No specific work location is stated beyond 'US'; the CBSA and state fields are left blank. The compensation range is US-wide.
Read the full posting
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