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.
Responsibilities
Software Development and Platform Architecture
- Own the technical architecture and evolution of shared platform capabilities across cloud services, execution infrastructure, equipment integration, and developer tooling.
- Define modular architectures, versioned APIs, typed interfaces, compatibility expectations, and reference implementations.
- Build critical services and resolve difficult implementation, integration, and performance problems.
- Establish patterns for event-driven communication, equipment state representation, command execution, and recovery without unintended repetition of physical actions.
- Define scientific data-ingestion and metadata interfaces that preserve experimental context, provenance, and traceability.
- Lead cross-team design and code reviews, documenting decisions and ensuring clean, maintainable, secure, and well-tested implementations.
- Establish AI-assisted development practices supported by rigorous review, testing, and validation.
Customer-Focused Delivery
- Partner with product managers, scientists, customers, and engineering leaders to understand workflows, constraints, and strategic requirements.
- Translate customer scenarios into platform capabilities, technical roadmaps, acceptance criteria, and achievable delivery increments.
- Validate architectural assumptions through prototypes, customer feedback, and operational evidence.
- Guide the transition from pilot integrations to reusable capabilities supporting multiple laboratories, vendors, applications, and customers.
- Coordinate technical dependencies and integration milestones across UK, IDC, and US teams. Enable rapid iteration while maintaining engineering quality and clear ownership across service boundaries.
Testing, Evaluation, and System Integration
- Define verification strategies for spanning unit, integration, functional, performance, resilience, and system-level testing.
- Establish simulation, equipment emulation, and hardware-in-the-loop integration frameworks with UK-based engineers responsible for physical laboratory testing.
- Define acceptance criteria for equipment interfaces, execution semantics, fault recovery, and compatibility.
- Establish evaluation infrastructure for AI-enabled capabilities, including tool correctness, context handling, execution validation, and human approval.
- Ensure platform designs respect equipment operating limits, interlocks, and safety boundaries defined by controls and safety specialists.
- Lead investigations into failures spanning cloud services, communications, local execution, and equipment interfaces.
Reliability, Security, and Operations
- Define service objectives and operational readiness expectations across availability, latency, resilience, capacity, and recovery.
- Establish identity, access control, policy enforcement, secure communications, auditability, and data protection patterns.
- Support production services through an on-call rotation that provides 24×7 response coverage for service incidents.
- Define observability standards covering monitoring, logging, metrics, telemetry, health checks, and alerts.
- Lead complex incident investigations, root-cause analysis, and corrective actions across service and team boundaries.
- Follow OCI standards for secure development, reliability, availability, privacy, and operational readiness.
- Establish deployment automation, runbooks, support documentation, compatibility management, and recovery procedures.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with OCI, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or another cloud platform.
- Deep experience with Kubernetes, Docker, microservices, distributed data systems, event-driven architectures, or workflow orchestration.
- Experience designing cloud-to-edge platforms, remote equipment management, or distributed orchestration of physical systems.
- Experience with robotics or industrial integration technologies such as ROS 2, DDS, MQTT, OPC UA, or vendor equipment SDKs.
- Experience with laboratory software platforms, electronic laboratory notebooks (ELN), laboratory information management systems (LIMS), SiLA 2, or instrument integration frameworks.
- Experience building simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, or evaluation infrastructure for robotics or AI-enabled systems.
- Experience with workflow engines, scheduling, planning, or shared-resource coordination.
- Experience with data engineering, scientific data pipelines, metadata management, data provenance, or data governance.
- Experience with AI/ML platforms, model training, model serving, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), evaluation harnesses, AI agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP), or enterprise AI integrations.
- Experience supporting scientific, research, life-sciences, or enterprise platform workloads.
- Experience evolving customer pilots into extensible platform offerings and driving adoption across multiple teams or customers.
Location Nashville, Tennessee, United States. This is a fully on-site position at Oracle’s Nashville office. You will collaborate closely with UK and IDC engineering teams through remote technical design, development, integration, and operational activities.
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:
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance, including expert medical opinion
- Short term disability and long term disability
- Life insurance and AD&D
- Supplemental life insurance (Employee/Spouse/Child)
- Health care and dependent care Flexible Spending Accounts
- Pre-tax commuter and parking benefits
- 401(k) Savings and Investment Plan with company match
- 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.
- 11 paid holidays
- 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.
- Paid parental leave
- Adoption assistance
- Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- Financial planning and group legal
- 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.
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