Principal Engineer
- Salary
- Not stated
- Level
- Staff
- Work type
- Not stated
- Visa
- Not stated
Open. First seen 10 October 2026.
About the role
Cognee is building the memory engine + data plane for AI agents to plan, reason, and act. Our open-source Python SDK is in production at 70+ companies, hit GitHub Trending, and runs 550 000 times a month . We’ve won early customers (top 10 Pharma etc) and just raised a large Seed.
We’re hiring a Principal Engineer to own the Cognee SDK as a product surface area — setting technical direction, raising engineering quality, and scaling adoption.
You'll be coding in Python and Rust.
What you’ll own
- SDK architecture, API design, and roadmap (Python now, future SDKs later)
- Release engineering: versioning, compatibility, CI/CD, testing, benchmarks
- Performance, reliability, observability, and production readiness
- Developer experience: docs, examples, reference implementations
- Open-source stewardship: contribution workflows, PR reviews, community support
- Cross-team leadership: shaping core platform contracts through the SDK
Requirements
What we’re looking for
- Principal-level ownership of a high-adoption SDK / developer platform / core library
- Deep Python skills (packaging, typing, testing, performance, clean APIs)
- Experience with production systems
- Strong taste for DX and high standards for stability and maintainability
- Bonus: open-source leadership, agent/memory/retrieval systems experience
- Hands-on experience with LLMs
The SDK is how the world experiences Cognee — you’ll define it.
Benefits
Up to 150 000 EUR + Equity
Company sponsored meals
Trips to San Francisco
Fetch breaks with the office dog
Salary context
15 other open postings titled Principal Engineer state a salary: median USD 188,240 to USD 235,300 a year.
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