Principal Data Systems Software Engineer

Responsibilities

• Product development and technical ownership
• Design, implement, and maintain ZDLRA features and enhancements in C and PL/SQL on Linux, contributing to Oracle database kernel and systems software development.
• Translate requirements and technical problems into clear designs, manageable tasks, and deliverable milestones. Evaluate alternatives and document trade-offs involving correctness, performance, scalability, compatibility, and maintainability.
• Apply appropriate algorithms and data structures to build efficient, reliable software. Reason about memory use, concurrency, synchronization, and behavior under demanding workloads.
• Develop and improve assigned components involving buffers, caches, storage, file systems, I/O, networking, and distributed processing, with careful attention to data integrity and recovery behavior.
• Build product expertise through code exploration, technical documentation, collaboration, and delivery of fixes and enhancements. Progress toward ownership of assigned features and projects, including subsequent development, maintenance, and defect resolution.
• Investigation, performance, and quality
• Investigate complex defects, including issues reported from customer deployments. Reproduce failures, trace relevant code paths, establish root causes, and implement durable fixes.
• Use GDB, core dumps, logs, traces, profiling tools, and Linux utilities to gather evidence and understand software behavior across interacting components.
• Diagnose performance and scalability bottlenecks involving CPU, memory, storage, I/O, and networking. Establish useful measurements and validate the impact of changes against representative workloads.
• Design and implement tests alongside production code. Cover functional behavior, boundary conditions, regressions, concurrency, and relevant failure and recovery scenarios using the team's engineering and test frameworks.
• Use shell scripting and automation to improve diagnostic data collection, issue reproduction, testing, and other repeatable development tasks.
• Follow secure coding practices and engineering standards. Evaluate error handling, resource management, backward compatibility, and versioning implications when modifying existing code or interfaces.
• Engineering execution and collaboration
• Take assigned work through the software development lifecycle, from analysis and design through implementation, review, testing, integration, and maintenance.
• Plan work realistically, identify dependencies, and communicate progress, design decisions, risks, and blockers. Coordinate with the engineering team to deliver agreed project milestones.
• Collaborate closely with ZDLRA engineers in India and the US and with relevant database engineering teams to resolve cross-component issues and deliver shared product objectives.
• Participate in design and code reviews, providing constructive feedback on correctness, clarity, performance, security, test coverage, and long-term maintainability.
• Write and maintain useful design notes, implementation documentation, and troubleshooting guidance. Share findings so that investigations and engineering decisions benefit the wider team.
• Use internal documentation, specifications, and existing code resourcefully to understand unfamiliar areas. Ask focused questions, seek timely feedback, and help colleagues solve technical problems.
• As product expertise grows, provide technical guidance, mentor colleagues, and contribute to improvements in the team's development practices and engineering quality.
• AI-assisted engineering
• Use LLMs and AI coding agents to accelerate code exploration, problem analysis, implementation, test development, and documentation where they are useful.
• Critically review AI-generated suggestions and verify them against the actual codebase, requirements, and observed behavior. Validate changes through appropriate reviews and tests, and remain accountable for the correctness, security, performance, and maintainability of delivered software.