Lead Principal Platform Software Engineer

Join Oracle’s AI and Robotics team to define and build software platforms that bring together scientific workflows, AI, robotics, and laboratory automation in support of the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT).

Within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), we are developing shared cloud services, integration frameworks, execution infrastructure, and developer tools for AI-enabled life sciences laboratories. These capabilities help scientists and application teams develop and operate automated workflows across diverse robots, scientific instruments, and laboratory equipment.

We are seeking a Lead Principal Software Engineer to set long-term technical direction for the Robotics Automation Platform. You will lead architecture and technical delivery across services and teams, translating emerging customer requirements into reusable platform capabilities.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role combining architectural leadership with substantial implementation responsibility. You will guide principal and senior engineers, personally build foundational capabilities, and resolve complex issues across distributed services, AI infrastructure, and equipment integration.

Based in Nashville, you will collaborate closely with engineering teams in the United Kingdom and India Development Centre (IDC). UK-based colleagues will support physical equipment integration and laboratory validation, working with you on platform interfaces, simulation, diagnostics, and system verification.

We welcome experience across cloud platforms, distributed systems, AI infrastructure, robotics, industrial automation, and scientific software. Previous laboratory automation experience is valuable but is not essential.

What You’ll Do

- Define platform architecture and service boundaries across laboratory workflow orchestration, resource management, robotic fleet coordination, device integration, and local execution.

Lead technical delivery of foundational cloud services, APIs, SDKs, integration frameworks, and developer tools.

- Establish reusable equipment capability models, adapter contracts, and secure interfaces between cloud services and laboratory systems.

- Architect shared execution infrastructure covering state management, asynchronous operations, persistence, retries, idempotency, and recovery from partial failures.

- Define infrastructure for agentic capabilities, including tool execution, context management, orchestration, evaluation, and human oversight.

- Establish clear boundaries between AI-driven decisions, deterministic execution, equipment control, and independent physical safety systems.

- Personally design, implement, test, and deploy critical platform components and reference implementations.

- Partner with product leaders, scientists, customers, and engineers to sequence investments and balance immediate customer needs with long-term platform reuse.

- Resolve architectural dependencies and guide technical delivery across Nashville, UK, and IDC teams.

- Mentor principal and senior engineers and establish consistent engineering practices across the platform.

What You’ll Bring

- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including sustained technical leadership for complex production platforms or distributed systems.

- Demonstrated architectural ownership across multiple services and teams, from ambiguous requirements through deployment and ongoing operation.

- Deep expertise in cloud-native distributed systems, service design, APIs, and integration frameworks.

- Strong, current programming skills in Python, Go, Java, C++, or similar languages, with evidence of personally delivering substantial production software.

- Experience building infrastructure for agentic systems, including tool integration, context and state management, orchestration, evaluation, human review, and failure recovery.

- Strong understanding of concurrency, asynchronous execution, message delivery, persistence, consistency, and recovery across distributed components.

- Experience defining secure interfaces, data models, service contracts, and engineering standards that allow teams to deliver compatible capabilities independently.

- Ability to resolve complex technical trade-offs across reliability, security, scalability, performance, cost, and delivery priorities.

- Proven ability to influence cross-team decisions, mentor experienced engineers, and communicate technical strategy to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

- Experience collaborating across geographically distributed teams, with clear technical documentation and effective asynchronous communication.

- Bachelor's degree in computer science, Robotics, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

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: $113,600 to $306,400 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.