Principal Software Engineer
- Level
- Principal
Not stated in the posting: salary, work type, visa.
Open. First seen 2 October 2026.
About the role
What Cognite is: Relentless to achieve
Cognite - AI for Industry's standard text
Cognite operates at the forefront of industrial digitalization, building AI, and data solutions that solve the world’s hardest, highest-impact problems. With unmatched industrial heritage and a comprehensive suite of AI capabilities, including low-code AI agents, Cognite accelerates the digital transformation to drive operational improvements.
We thrive in challenges. We challenge assumptions. We execute with speed and ownership. If you view obstacles as signals to step forward - not backwards - you’ll feel right at home here.
Our Moonshot is bold: Unlock $100B in customer value by 2035, and redefine how global industry works. Join us in this venture where AI and data meet ingenuity, and together, we will forge the path to a smarter, more connected industrial future.
How you’ll demonstrate Ownership
As the first line of defense for securing privileged customer data, our work is crucial to customer and company success. We operate where security, infrastructure, and product meet: designing authorization, identity, and audit solutions that are fast, correct, and observable. As a Principal Engineer, you will take ownership of security-critical backend systems, directly impacting how our platform is secured and used.
The Impact you bring to Cognite
- Architecting and building our core authentication and authorization services, applying modern security principles to protect all customer data.
- Designing and scaling resilient gRPC/HTTP APIs and microservices on Kubernetes, ensuring high availability, low latency, and ease of integration for other internal teams.
- Driving backend innovation by writing clean, maintainable code and refining our service architecture to support rapid product growth.
- Leading development initiatives including threat modeling, performance tuning, and reliability engineering to harden our systems against evolving security challenges.
- Mentoring engineers and collaborating across teams to shape our technical roadmap and foster a culture of secure-by-default engineering.
Required Qualifications
- Significant experience building and operating distributed backend systems in a modern, typed language.
- Strong proficiency in Kotlin. We value deep expertise in either language and a pragmatic approach to choosing the right tool for the job.
- Deep expertise in modern authentication and authorization concepts (e.g., OIDC, OAuth2, RBAC/ABAC) and their practical application in building secure services.
- Hands-on experience with cloud-native technologies, particularly Elasticsearch and cloud platforms like GCP, AWS or Azure is vital.
Preferred Experience
- A proven track record of owning services in production, from initial design and development to deployment, monitoring, and incident response.
- A collaborative and pragmatic mindset, with good communication skills and a desire to mentor others.
A snapshot of our many perks and benefits as a Cogniter
* Join an organization of 60 different nationalities 🌐 with Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) in focus 🤝
* A highly modern and fun working environment with sublime culture across the organization, follow us on Instagram @cognitedata 📷 to know more
* Flat structure with direct access to decision-makers
* Opportunity to work with and learn from some of the best people on some of the most ambitious projects found anywhere, across industries, with cutting edge technology
* Join our HUB 🗣️ to be part of the conversation directly with Cogniters and our partners.
* Get access to private health services with Cognite Care.
* Hungry? We’ve got your back. A subsidized lunch at the canteen is delivered by the chefs at Fornebuporten (Aker Tech House)
* Our own Cognite exclusive coffee bar ☕ with the friendliest baristas is here to brew coffee for coffee lovers, tea for tea lovers, smoothie for smoothie lovers, and the baristas creative concoctions when the mood strikes.
* We take your mental- and physical health seriously by having a broad health offering and a free membership to our fully-staffed gym on-site.
* A pet lover? Get the chance to meet Spot at the Robot Garden!
Cognite - AI for Industry's standard text
Learn more about us
- Impact 2025
- Cognite's Industrial AI: Moonshot
- We’re globally recognized domain experts with an international presence that spans Phoenix, Houston, Oslo Tokyo, Bengaluru, and Abu Dhabi.
Equal Opportunity
Cognite is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment at work and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive the same level of consideration for employment.
What this role asks for
Particular to this role
Elasticsearch · Kotlin · Microservices · OAuth · gRPC
Rare in Cognite - AI for Industry's other 34 open postings.
In most of Cognite - AI for Industry's ads
Azure
Named in most of its open postings, whatever the role.
79% of this description is written for the role. The rest is Cognite - AI for Industry's standard text, folded away below.
Read against Cognite - AI for Industry's other open postings on this site.
The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY
This role is one of 7 open in Engineering. 4 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in August: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
AWS (7 of 7), Azure (7 of 7), GCP (7 of 7), Kubernetes (7 of 7), Kotlin (6 of 7), Python (6 of 7), Kafka (5 of 7)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Senior Software Engineer - Fullstack posted Oct 12
- Software Engineer posted Oct 9
- Software Engineer posted Sep 25
- Principal Software Engineer posted Aug 26
- Senior Database Reliability Engineer - DBRE posted Aug 12
- Senior Software Engineer - Work Flows posted Aug 7
From the team and dates on Cognite - AI for Industry's own job board.
Salary context
49 other open postings titled Principal Software Engineer state a salary: median USD 200,000 to USD 250,000 a year.
Similar jobs
- Software Engineering Lead, Backend Architect at Distro
Shares 7 skills: gRPC, Elasticsearch, Microservices… - Senior Software Engineer at Warner Bros. Discovery
Shares 7 skills: gRPC, Elasticsearch, Microservices… - Senior Big Data Software Engineer at EPAM Systems
Shares 7 skills: gRPC, Elasticsearch, Kotlin… - Staff Software Engineer, Backend at Cresta
Shares 6 skills: gRPC, Elasticsearch, GCP… · Staff level - Senior Software Developer - KLPTK at Valsoft Corporation
Shares 6 skills: Elasticsearch, OAuth, Microservices… - Senior Software Engineer - Fullstack at Cognite - AI for Industry
Also at this company
Is this your posting and you want it taken down? Email info@careerholo.com.