Principal Engineer (Architect)

About Cognite Embark on a transformative journey with Cognite, a global SaaS forerunner in leveraging AI and data to unravel complex business challenges through our cutting-edge offerings including Cognite Atlas AI, an industrial agent workbench, and the Cognite Data Fusion (CDF) platform. We were awarded the 2022 Technology Innovation Leader for Global Digital Industrial Platforms & Cognite was recognized as 2024 Microsoft Energy and Resources Partner of the Year. In the realm of industrial digital transformation, we stand at the forefront, reshaping the future of Oil & Gas, Chemicals, Pharma and other Manufacturing and Energy sectors. Join us in this venture where AI and data meet ingenuity, and together, we forge the path to a smarter, more connected industrial future. About the Opportunity We're building the data engineering backbone of the next-generation industrial AI platform in our Bengaluru engineering hub, led by our VP of Engineering. This is a greenfield opportunity to architect and own large-scale distributed systems that process and contextualize industrial data at massive scale, from real-time streaming pipelines ingesting terabytes daily, to high-performance query engines serving thousands of concurrent users globally.If you've ever wanted to work on genuinely hard technical problems where milliseconds matter, data integrity is non-negotiable, and your code directly impacts billion-dollar industrial operations, this is it. How you will drive impact

Technical Strategy & Architecture

Define platform architecture for next-generation industrial data processing capabilities serving 100M+ daily requests

Drive technology roadmap decisions that impact multiple engineering teams and product areas

Lead architectural reviews and establish technical standards across the data platform organization

Champion innovation initiatives that differentiate Cognite's technical capabilities in the industrial data market

Architect foundational systems that serve as building blocks for multiple product teams and use cases

Design advanced abstractions and frameworks that accelerate development velocity across the organization

Own end-to-end platform reliability including SLAs, disaster recovery, and operational excellence

Drive platform observability strategy with comprehensive metrics, alerting, and distributed tracing

Lead Apache Spark ecosystem contributions - modify core components, contribute to open-source projects, influence roadmaps

Architect multi-petabyte streaming systems using Flink, Kafka, and custom processing engines for industrial IoT data

Design custom query engines and DSLs optimized for time-series analytics and operational data patterns

Pioneer advanced optimization techniques for columnar storage, query planning, and distributed execution

Mentor Staff and Senior engineers across multiple teams, developing technical leadership capabilities

Drive cross-functional initiatives involving ML platform, product engineering, and infrastructure teams

Establish engineering culture around technical excellence, innovation, and customer obsession

Represent Cognite externally through conference speaking, open- source leadership, and technical thought leadership

What you will bring

Technical Leadership & Impact.

Architecting at Scale (8+ years): Expert in distributed systems, data-intensive architecture, and performance engineering. Hands-on with Spark internals, Flink/Kafka streaming at million+ events/sec scale, and custom query or execution engine development.

Tech Stack Mastery:

Kotlin, Scala, Java (advanced JVM tuning) | Apache Spark, Flink, Kafka, Airflow | ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, S3 systems | Kubernetes, Terraform, full observability stack

Innovation You’ll Drive:

Next-Gen Data Systems: Iceberg & Delta Lake internals, Trino/Pinot query engines

Streaming & Real-Time Analytics: Complex event processing, exactly-once semantics, advanced windowing

AI/ML Integration: Feature stores, MLOps, and model-serving infrastructure

Core Engineering Challenges:

Real-time Industrial IoT data pipelines | Advanced time-series analytics | Multi-cloud cost & performance optimization | Secure enterprise integrations

Platform & Data Leadership:

Built multi-tenant platforms serving 50+ teams | Designed exabyte-scale data lakes with intelligent tiering and query optimization | Deep OLAP expertise (ClickHouse, Pinot, Druid) and event-driven data modeling

Leadership & Influence:

Defined architectural vision and standards | Guided technology evaluations and debt management | Mentored senior engineers and communicated complex strategies to executives

Open Source & Community Leadership:

Contributor or maintainer in major Apache projects (Spark, Flink, Kafka) | Speaker at top tech conferences (Strata, QCon, Spark Summit) | Active in engineering communities and standards groups

Startup & Scale DNA:

Led teams through 10x growth | Delivered measurable business impact | Built and scaled platforms from concept to production under high ambiguity

What we offer

Competitive compensation aligned with top talent in the Indian market

Opportunity to work on globally impactful products used by Fortune 500 companies

Career growth: Clear path to the next levels of technical leadership and impact

Modern work environment: Flexible hybrid work, top-tier tools and infrastructure

Learning & development: Conference budgets, certifications, and continuous upskilling

Work directly with VP of Engineering and leadership team in a high-trust, high-autonomy environment