Principal Software Engineer (workflow / platform)

Cognite Bengaluru, India

About the role

This is a principal software engineering role at Cognite, on-site in Bengaluru, building distributed systems for the core serverless execution and workflow orchestration layers of an industrial data platform. It suits a senior backend engineer with deep distributed-systems experience who wants to own platform reliability, scalability, and API design for infrastructure that Fortune 500 industrial customers depend on. The role covers everything from incident response and SLOs to observability and cost efficiency for the platform.

What you’ll do

  • Design, build, and operate the core serverless execution engine and Workflows orchestration layer
  • Own uptime, latency SLOs, and incident response for platform services
  • Architect for multi-tenant and multi-cloud, high-throughput workloads
  • Design scheduling, queueing, and retry mechanisms that degrade gracefully under pressure
  • Define and evolve a clean API-first architecture with versioned REST and event-driven APIs
  • Instrument services with distributed tracing, structured logging, and alerting
  • Champion test automation and maintain deployment pipelines
  • Profile and resolve bottlenecks in execution throughput and cold-start latencies
  • Model compute and storage costs and implement cost optimizations

What they’re looking for

  • 10+ years of engineering experience building and operating production backend services at scale
  • Deep mastery of JVM languages (Kotlin preferred, Java acceptable), Python (FastAPI), and distributed systems patterns
  • Cloud-native service design experience with Kubernetes, Azure, GCP, AWS, or private cloud
  • Hands-on experience with workflow engines such as Conductor or Apache Airflow
  • Experience with event-driven architectures such as Kafka or Pub/Sub
  • Comfort with relational (PostgreSQL) and non-relational databases, object storage, and caching layers (Redis)
  • Practical experience with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Grafana
  • Exposure to supporting ML workloads and notebooks in production

Nice to have

  • Familiarity with industrial knowledge graph construction, entity resolution, or NLP/CV pipelines
  • Familiarity with React or TypeScript
  • Experience with vector and embedding infrastructure for semantic search or RAG

Questions about this role

Is this role remote?

No, it's based in Cognite's Bengaluru office.

How many years of experience do I need?

10+ years of experience building and operating production backend services at scale.

What technologies does this role use?

Kotlin or Java, Python (FastAPI), Kubernetes, Kafka or Pub/Sub, PostgreSQL, Redis, and an observability stack of OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Grafana.

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