Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is seeking a Senior Manager of Software Development to lead a greenfield Data Processing Unit (DPU) initiative spanning networking and storage. You will help define the architecture, build the engineering team, and establish the practices that take a new platform from initial concepts to production.
This role offers substantial ownership over foundational decisions: how data paths are designed, where hardware acceleration adds value, how components interact, and how performance and reliability are validated. You will turn an ambitious vision into an executable roadmap, guiding development across software, firmware, and hardware.
We are looking for an engineering leader with deep networking data plane expertise and familiarity across storage systems and storage data paths. Substantial experience building storage infrastructure would be especially valuable. You will combine the technical judgment to guide complex architectural decisions with the management skills to recruit, develop, and lead an exceptional team.
About the role
You will own the team’s engineering direction, delivery, and operational outcomes. Working closely with senior engineers, architects, and partner organizations, you will guide DPU software through architecture, implementation, performance validation, deployment, and production operation.
This role requires a manager who stays close to the technology. You should be comfortable examining packet processing architectures, discussing storage I/O behavior, challenging performance assumptions, and helping engineers resolve difficult systems problems. You will establish clear ownership while giving engineers the autonomy and support to make sound decisions.
Your influence will extend across networking, storage, compute, security, hardware, and operations teams. You will align these partners around clear interfaces, shared priorities, and practical delivery plans. As the initiative grows, you will develop technical leaders and strengthen the team’s ability to deliver increasingly complex capabilities.
What you will lead
- Build from the ground up. Partner with senior engineers and stakeholders to define the initial architecture, validate critical assumptions through prototypes and benchmarks, and establish a phased path to production. Balance early progress with the foundations needed for long-term reliability, performance, and maintainability.
- Build and develop an exceptional team. Recruit strong systems engineers, coach engineers and technical leads, provide actionable feedback, and create opportunities for career growth. Establish an inclusive environment that values technical rigor, collaboration, and ownership.
- Define technical strategy and architecture. Establish the DPU software roadmap, packet processing and storage data path architectures, hardware abstraction boundaries, and acceleration strategies. Guide decisions that balance performance, reliability, security, complexity, and maintainability.
- Own execution from concept to production. Translate infrastructure goals into focused engineering plans with clear milestones, dependencies, and success criteria. Manage priorities, resolve obstacles, and communicate progress and risks clearly.
- Drive networking data plane excellence. Lead development of efficient packet processing, network virtualization, forwarding, encapsulation, policy enforcement, and traffic management capabilities. Guide the team in designing for congestion, resource pressure, and component failures.
- Connect networking and storage design. Work with storage teams to understand requirements and identify opportunities for acceleration. Guide decisions across network transport, storage protocols, data movement, isolation, data integrity, and recovery.
- Establish a rigorous performance discipline. Define representative workloads and benchmarks for throughput, latency, tail latency, packet loss, IOPS, CPU utilization, and resource efficiency. Guide investigations across the full path from application I/O through software, firmware, and hardware.
- Deliver production reliability. Make observability, fault isolation, safe upgrades, compatibility, and recovery part of the architecture and development process. Own operational readiness and ensure production experience leads to lasting engineering improvements.
- Raise engineering quality. Set expectations for design reviews, code reviews, automated testing, performance regression detection, documentation, and release qualification. Encourage clear designs and disciplined execution while maintaining a sustainable pace.
- Lead across organizational boundaries. Build effective partnerships with networking, storage, compute, security, hardware, and operations teams. Resolve competing requirements and make technical tradeoffs understandable to engineers and business leaders.
- Lead responsible adoption of AI tools. Help the team adopt AI tools to improve development, testing, debugging, documentation, and knowledge sharing. Establish practices that require appropriate human review and preserve engineering accountability. Evaluate adoption through improvements in quality, productivity, and employee experience.
Internal Responsibilities
- Experience leading a greenfield systems or infrastructure initiative from an ambiguous starting point through architecture, team formation, and production delivery.
- Demonstrated experience managing software engineering teams delivering complex systems or infrastructure software, including hiring, performance management, coaching, and developing technical leaders.
- Deep networking data plane expertise, supported by substantial experience designing, implementing, or leading delivery of high-performance packet processing systems.
- Familiarity with both networking and storage architectures, including their data paths, performance characteristics, resource constraints, and failure modes.
- Understanding of how network transport, congestion, loss, and recovery affect storage throughput, latency, and availability.
- Strong knowledge of Linux systems, concurrency, memory management, multicore processing, and performance optimization.
- Experience with network virtualization and core networking concepts such as packet forwarding, routing, encapsulation, and traffic management.
- A record of shipping infrastructure software into production and taking responsibility for its reliability, performance, and ongoing evolution.
- Ability to lead through ambiguity, establish priorities, and deliver results across teams with significant technical dependencies.
- Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain architectural decisions, delivery risks, and operational issues to different audiences.
- Ability to guide responsible use of AI tools in engineering workflows, with sound judgment about their capabilities, limitations, security implications, and verification needs.
- A management approach that connects productivity improvements with employee well-being, professional growth, and sustainable delivery.
- A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related discipline.
Preferred qualifications
- Substantial experience designing, delivering, or operating storage systems, distributed storage infrastructure, or storage data planes.
- Experience with block storage, NVMe, NVMe over Fabrics, RDMA, storage virtualization, or storage I/O optimization.
- Experience with DPUs, SmartNICs, or programmable networking technologies, including AMD Pensando, NVIDIA BlueField/DOCA, P4, or comparable technologies.
- Experience with DPDK or other high-performance user-space packet processing frameworks.
- Knowledge of hardware and software co-design, firmware integration, PCIe, DMA, SR-IOV, IOMMU, and efficient data movement.
- Experience implementing or accelerating virtual switching, connection tracking, network policy, storage protocols, or infrastructure security functions.
- Experience qualifying and deploying infrastructure software across large fleets, including staged rollouts, upgrade compatibility, and failure recovery.
- A record of growing teams that combine networking, storage, and low-level systems expertise.
What success looks like
You will establish a strong engineering team, a coherent architecture, and a credible path from prototypes to production. Critical technical assumptions will be tested early, and the roadmap will connect platform capabilities to measurable performance and reliability goals.
As the platform matures, your team will deliver infrastructure that is efficient, observable, maintainable, and dependable. Engineers will have clear ownership and opportunities to grow, supported by effective partnerships across networking and storage organizations.
The team will use AI tools thoughtfully to improve engineering effectiveness and employee experience. Your leadership will connect better ways of working with engineering quality, professional development, and sustainable delivery.
Why join us
This is an opportunity to shape a foundational infrastructure platform from its earliest stages. You will influence the architecture, assemble the team, and establish an engineering culture that can carry the initiative into production and beyond.
If you enjoy developing strong engineers, solving demanding networking and storage problems, and turning ambitious ideas into dependable systems, we would like to hear from you.
External Responsibilities
- Experience leading a greenfield systems or infrastructure initiative from an ambiguous starting point through architecture, team formation, and production delivery.
- Demonstrated experience managing software engineering teams delivering complex systems or infrastructure software, including hiring, performance management, coaching, and developing technical leaders.
- Deep networking data plane expertise, supported by substantial experience designing, implementing, or leading delivery of high-performance packet processing systems.
- Familiarity with both networking and storage architectures, including their data paths, performance characteristics, resource constraints, and failure modes.
- Understanding of how network transport, congestion, loss, and recovery affect storage throughput, latency, and availability.
- Strong knowledge of Linux systems, concurrency, memory management, multicore processing, and performance optimization.
- Experience with network virtualization and core networking concepts such as packet forwarding, routing, encapsulation, and traffic management.
- A record of shipping infrastructure software into production and taking responsibility for its reliability, performance, and ongoing evolution.
- Ability to lead through ambiguity, establish priorities, and deliver results across teams with significant technical dependencies.
- Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain architectural decisions, delivery risks, and operational issues to different audiences.
- Ability to guide responsible use of AI tools in engineering workflows, with sound judgment about their capabilities, limitations, security implications, and verification needs.
- A management approach that connects productivity improvements with employee well-being, professional growth, and sustainable delivery.
- A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related discipline.
Preferred qualifications
- Substantial experience designing, delivering, or operating storage systems, distributed storage infrastructure, or storage data planes.
- Experience with block storage, NVMe, NVMe over Fabrics, RDMA, storage virtualization, or storage I/O optimization.
- Experience with DPUs, SmartNICs, or programmable networking technologies, including AMD Pensando, NVIDIA BlueField/DOCA, P4, or comparable technologies.
- Experience with DPDK or other high-performance user-space packet processing frameworks.
- Knowledge of hardware and software co-design, firmware integration, PCIe, DMA, SR-IOV, IOMMU, and efficient data movement.
- Experience implementing or accelerating virtual switching, connection tracking, network policy, storage protocols, or infrastructure security functions.
- Experience qualifying and deploying infrastructure software across large fleets, including staged rollouts, upgrade compatibility, and failure recovery.
- A record of growing teams that combine networking, storage, and low-level systems expertise.
What success looks like
You will establish a strong engineering team, a coherent architecture, and a credible path from prototypes to production. Critical technical assumptions will be tested early, and the roadmap will connect platform capabilities to measurable performance and reliability goals.
As the platform matures, your team will deliver infrastructure that is efficient, observable, maintainable, and dependable. Engineers will have clear ownership and opportunities to grow, supported by effective partnerships across networking and storage organizations.
The team will use AI tools thoughtfully to improve engineering effectiveness and employee experience. Your leadership will connect better ways of working with engineering quality, professional development, and sustainable delivery.
Why join us
This is an opportunity to shape a foundational infrastructure platform from its earliest stages. You will influence the architecture, assemble the team, and establish an engineering culture that can carry the initiative into production and beyond.
If you enjoy developing strong engineers, solving demanding networking and storage problems, and turning ambitious ideas into dependable systems, we would like to hear from you.
