Principal Backend Engineer

Cognite operates at the forefront of industrial digitalization, building AI and data solutions that solve some of 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.

Our moonshot is bold: unlock $100B in customer value by 2035 and redefine how global industry works.

What Cognite is Relentless to achieve

We thrive in challenges. We challenge assumptions. We execute with speed and ownership. If you view obstacles as signals to step forward - not step back - you’ll feel at home here. Join us in this venture where AI and data meet ingenuity, and together, we 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 Rust or 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 Kubernetes and cloud platforms like GCP, AWS or Azure.

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!

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.