Software Engineer Principal - Oracle DBA

Position Overview

At PNC, our people are our greatest differentiator and competitive advantage in the markets we serve. We are all united in delivering the best experience for our customers. We work together each day to foster an inclusive workplace culture where all of our employees feel respected, valued and have an opportunity to contribute to the company’s success. As a Software Engineer, Principal within PNC's Technology organization, you will be based in Pittsburgh, PA, Strongsville, OH or Denver, CO.

The Software Engineer Principal – Oracle Application DBA is a senior technical authority responsible for SQL performance optimization, query tuning, and database efficiency for high volume fraud transaction processing platforms. This role is deeply embedded with Fraud Transactions Engineering teams and focuses on ensuring that transaction critical queries execute predictably, efficiently, and s position plays a direct role in protecting customer transactions by enabling real time and batch fraud detection systems to operate with low latency, high throughput, and production stability.

This role is deliberately specialized and centered on:

• SQL tuning and execution plan optimization
• Diagnosing and eliminating query driven performance bottlenecks
• Optimizing database access patterns for transaction heavy fraud workloads
• Partnering with engineers to design performant schemas and queries

• Serve as the principal expert for SQL tuning and performance optimization across fraud transaction databases.
• Analyze execution plans, wait events, and query behavior to identify inefficiencies and systemic patterns.
• Optimize complex, long running, and high frequency queries supporting real time fraud decisioning and batch processing.
• Define and enforce best practices for query design, indexing strategies, and data access patterns.

• Work directly with Fraud Transactions Engineering teams during design, development, and support to ensure queries are performant by design.
• Review application SQL, stored procedures, and schema changes prior to production deployment.
• Partner with engineers to refactor inefficient queries and data models that impact throughput or latency.
• Provide hands on guidance during performance incidents to rapidly isolate query level root causes.

• Monitor and proactively improve database performance for transaction intensive workloads.
• Identify and remediate query patterns that contribute to contention, resource exhaustion, or instability.
• Drive improvements in observability related to SQL execution, response times, and resource usage.
• Reduce repeat incidents by addressing underlying query and design issues, not just symptoms.

• Establish and maintain SQL performance standards for fraud platforms.
• Act as a technical authority and mentor for engineers and DBAs on performance centric database practices.
• Influence platform level decisions related to data access, scalability, and workload management.
• Communicate complex performance findings clearly to engineering leadership and stakeholders.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• Experience working with Oracle databases, with deep specialization in SQL tuning and performance optimization.
• Expert level understanding of Oracle execution plans, indexing strategies, and query optimization techniques.
• Proven experience supporting high volume, transaction heavy production systems.
• Strong ability to collaborate with application engineers and influence design decisions.

PNC is an in-office company that fosters a supportive culture where employees can thrive and achieve balance. We encourage candidates to connect with their recruiter and hiring manager to understand workplace expectations and ensure the role aligns with their goals. PNC will not provide sponsorship for employment visas or participate in STEM OPT for this position.

• Aligns business strategy with software solutions.
• Proposes, designs & codes software…