Director of Software Development — DPU Networking and Storage

About the role

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is seeking a Director of Software Development to lead a greenfield Data Processing Unit (DPU) initiative spanning networking and storage. You will build and scale multiple engineering teams, establish their charters and leadership structure, and guide a new platform from initial concepts into production.

The initiative involves consequential decisions: which infrastructure functions belong on the host versus the DPU, how networking and storage acceleration should be sequenced, and how to preserve predictable performance and correctness through congestion, failures, and upgrades. You will ensure that architectural choices translate into measurable infrastructure benefits and a practical path to adoption.

You will own the organization’s engineering priorities, resource allocation, leadership development, delivery commitments, and software readiness. Working with senior technical leaders, you will establish technical direction and resolve major tradeoffs while enabling them to lead detailed architectural development. With hardware and consuming service organizations, you will align dependencies, integration plans, and adoption milestones.

We are looking for a leader with deep networking data plane expertise and familiarity across storage architectures and data paths. Substantial storage experience would be especially valuable. You should combine strong systems judgment with a record of developing managers, building engineering organizations, and delivering production infrastructure across organizational boundaries.

What you will lead

Set platform strategy and investment priorities. Establish a multiyear direction and phased roadmap grounded in service requirements. Decide which capabilities justify investment, balancing performance, infrastructure efficiency, engineering effort, operational cost, and integration complexity.

Build the organization and its leadership. Define team boundaries and ownership, recruit engineering managers and senior technical talent, and establish workforce plans. Develop managers through coaching, clear expectations, and feedback. Build succession plans and leadership depth as the initiative grows.

Guide consequential technical decisions. Partner with senior engineers to establish a coherent architecture across networking, storage, software, firmware, and hardware interfaces. Ensure critical assumptions are tested through prototypes and representative benchmarks. Resolve cross-team tradeoffs without becoming a bottleneck for detailed design decisions.

Own integrated execution. Translate strategy into coordinated commitments across teams. Allocate engineering capacity, sequence dependencies, and manage risks involving scope, schedule, technical debt, and hardware readiness. Communicate decisions and progress clearly, and adjust plans as evidence changes.

Connect technical performance to infrastructure value. Establish measurable goals for throughput, tail latency, storage I/O performance, reliability, and resource efficiency. Evaluate whether offload benefits justify the additional platform complexity, including host resources recovered and the engineering and operational effort required.

Drive production readiness and adoption. Own readiness of the software your organization builds, including qualification, observability, compatibility, safe upgrades, fault isolation, and recovery. Partner with consuming services on integration and staged deployment, with clear operational ownership and feedback into the roadmap.

Lead across organizational boundaries. Secure alignment on interfaces, priorities, and commitments with networking, storage, compute, security, hardware, and operations partners. Resolve competing requirements and distinguish decisions your organization owns from those requiring joint agreement or broader leadership support.

Improve how the organization works. Establish engineering standards and management practices that support quality, accountability, and sustainable delivery. Lead responsible adoption of AI tools in development, testing, debugging, documentation, and knowledge sharing. Require appropriate human review and evaluate results through engineering quality, productivity, reduced toil, and employee well-being.

Required qualifications

15+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 5+ years in engineering management and demonstrated experience managing and developing engineering managers.

A record of building or scaling multiple engineering teams, including organizational design, hiring, performance management, leadership development, and succession planning.

Deep networking data plane expertise, supported by substantial experience designing, implementing, or leading delivery of high-performance packet processing systems.

Familiarity with storage architectures and data paths, including how network transport, congestion, resource constraints, and recovery affect storage performance and availability.

A strong systems engineering background and the technical judgment to evaluate architecture, concurrency, memory management, hardware acceleration, and performance tradeoffs with senior engineers.

Experience leading a new infrastructure platform or a major architectural transition, translating ambiguous requirements into investment priorities, resource plans, and production outcomes.

A record of delivering and operating critical infrastructure software, coordinating dependencies across organizations, and driving integration or adoption by partner services.

Clear communication and influence with engineering and business leaders, combined with a management approach that supports accountability, professional growth, and sustainable workloads.

A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred qualifications

Experience in one or more of the following areas is valuable. Experience with every listed technology is not required.

DPU and networking acceleration. DPUs, SmartNICs, AMD Pensando, NVIDIA BlueField/DOCA, P4, DPDK, or comparable programmable networking and packet processing technologies.

Storage infrastructure. Substantial experience with storage systems or data planes, block storage, NVMe, NVMe over Fabrics, RDMA, or storage virtualization.

Hardware and software integration. Hardware co-design, firmware interfaces, PCIe, DMA, SR-IOV, IOMMU, or efficient data movement.

Platform and organization building. Establishing a greenfield engineering organization, coordinating software and hardware roadmaps, or driving platform adoption across multiple infrastructure services.

What success looks like

You will establish clear team charters, capable engineering leadership, and a prioritized platform roadmap. Critical architectural assumptions will be validated early, with explicit decisions about investment, interfaces, and delivery dependencies.

As the platform develops, teams will demonstrate measurable performance and reliability against representative workloads. Integration agreements with consuming services will lead to qualified deployments, clear operational accountability, and evidence that the platform delivers worthwhile infrastructure benefits.

The organization will grow in capability as well as size. Managers will lead effectively, technical leaders will have clear decision authority, and engineers will have opportunities to develop. Improvements in tools and practices—including responsible AI adoption—will support better engineering outcomes and healthier workloads.

Why join us

Shape a new infrastructure platform and build the organization that brings it to production. You will influence foundational architecture, develop engineering leaders, and make investment decisions that connect networking and storage innovation to practical cloud infrastructure outcomes.

This role offers the opportunity to combine deep technical engagement with meaningful organizational ownership, working alongside networking, storage, and hardware partners on demanding systems problems.

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: $122,500 to $355,400 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.