Principal Software Engineer

About this role

What Cognite is: Relentless to achieve 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.