Senior Principal Network Development Engineer (IC5) – Backend NIC Qualification & NPI (OCI AI2 – Performance & NIC Engineering)

Oracle is seeking a Senior Principal Network Development Engineer to lead backend NIC qualification and New Product Introduction for next-generation networking platforms. This role involves driving cross-organizational initiatives and ensuring NIC technologies meet stringent performance requirements for OCI’s AI superclusters.

Responsibilities:

• Own the end-to-end qualification strategy and execution for backend NICs supporting OCI AI clusters (RDMA/RoCE-based fabrics)
• Lead NIC NPI for AI infrastructure, from early silicon bring-up through fleet-wide deployment across OCI regions
• Define validation methodologies for high-performance, low-latency distributed training workloads (e.g., GPU collectives, east-west traffic patterns)
• Drive deep performance characterization and tuning of NICs in AI cluster environments (latency, throughput, tail latency, congestion behavior)
• Partner with NIC and silicon vendors (e.g., NVIDIA/Mellanox, Broadcom, Intel) to resolve complex hardware/firmware issues and influence feature design
• Collaborate with OCI AI/ML platform, cluster networking, and host software teams to ensure optimal integration with drivers, kernel, and user-space stacks
• Build and scale automated validation frameworks for continuous qualification across rapidly evolving AI hardware generations
• Lead root cause analysis (RCA) for systemic issues impacting cluster performance or reliability, driving fixes across stack layers
• Establish qualification gates, acceptance criteria, and release readiness processes aligned with OCI production standards
• Use production telemetry and workload insights to inform validation strategy and proactively identify risk areas
• Influence NIC and system architecture to meet the demands of next-generation AI workloads

Requirements:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field
• 8–12+ years of experience in networking, systems engineering, or hardware validation in large-scale distributed environments
• Deep expertise in NIC architecture and advanced features (RDMA/RoCE, congestion control, SR-IOV, queueing, offloads)
• Strong understanding of distributed systems networking for AI/ML workloads (e.g., collective communication patterns, east-west traffic scaling)
• Advanced knowledge of Linux networking stack and kernel-level debugging
• Proven experience leading hardware qualification and/or NPI efforts in data center or cloud environments
• Strong debugging skills across hardware, firmware, driver, and system layers
• Proficiency in automation and tooling (Python, Bash, or similar)
• Experience with performance benchmarking and traffic analysis in high-scale environments
• Experience with AI/HPC networking (e.g., RoCEv2, InfiniBand concepts, GPU cluster networking)
• Familiarity with distributed training frameworks (e.g., NCCL) and their network behavior
• Knowledge of PCIe, NUMA, and GPU/accelerator interconnect considerations
• Experience in hyperscale cloud environments
• Exposure to SmartNICs, DPUs, or offload-driven architectures
• Experience building validation pipelines integrated with CI/CD systems
• Background in large-scale cluster bring-up and production operations