Principal Software Engineer

What's the role?

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will help shape the future architecture of HERE’s mapmaking platform. You will drive large-scale modernization initiatives, establish engineering standards, and create scalable platform capabilities that support multiple generations of HERE products.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will help shape the future architecture of HERE’s mapmaking platform. You will drive large-scale modernization initiatives, establish engineering standards, and create scalable platform capabilities that support multiple generations of HERE products.

You will operate at the intersection of software engineering, architecture, platform strategy, and technical leadership. Working across engineering organizations, you will define technical direction and help create interoperable systems that support HERE’s current and future products.

• Drive the evolution of HERE’s mapmaking ecosystem from legacy technologies toward a unified, topology-based cloud platform.
• Lead the modernization and consolidation of mapmaking architectures into a scalable platform that supports current and future products.
• Design and influence platform architecture, APIs, shared data contracts, and interoperability standards across engineering domains.
• Create reusable platform capabilities that improve engineering productivity, consistency, and speed of delivery.
• Simplify end-to-end workflows by reducing platform complexity and improving data quality, governance, transparency, and certification.
• Guide the design and development of secure, reliable, and highly scalable distributed systems using modern cloud-native technologies.
• Champion engineering excellence through Agile development, Dev Ops practices, CI/CD automation, and operational best practices.
• Influence technical strategy and collaborate with engineering managers, architects, product leaders, and stakeholders across the organization.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, continuous learning, and technical excellence.

This role offers a unique opportunity to influence engineering direction across multiple teams while helping define the future foundation of HERE’s global mapmaking capabilities.

You enjoy solving complex technical challenges and creating scalable solutions that deliver broad organizational impact. You combine strong software engineering expertise with platform thinking, architectural leadership, and a passion for modernization.

To be successful in this role, it would be ideal if you bring:

• Experience designing and evolving distributed systems that manage highly connected datasets at very large scale, where query performance, consistency, and reliability are critical.
• Experience applying version-control concepts such as branching, commits, conflict resolution, and rollback to large-scale, non-code data assets.
• Experience building or operating rule-based validation and quality frameworks that treat data-correctness checks similarly to automated test suites.
• Experience leading migrations from legacy monolithic or relational architectures, including stored-procedure-heavy database environments, to modern distributed and cloud-native data platforms.
• Experience working with geospatial data structures and algorithms, including topology, spatial indexing, spatial joins, and large-scale geometry processing.
• Deep understanding of APIs, system integration, data contracts, and event-driven architectures that enable interoperability across multiple teams and platforms.
• Experience influencing technical strategy and building alignment across engineering organizations and stakeholders.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to translate complex technical…