[Hiring] Principal Software Engineer @8th Light

Role Description

As a go-to technologist and strategist within 8th Light, you’ll work with a variety of clients, typically one to two in a year, while continuing to deepen your and our collective domain expertise over the course of your career with us. You’ll be responsible for:

• Rapidly building trust with clients, demonstrating technical expertise and understanding of their domain and objectives
• Driving platform engineering work at the client level, connecting long-term technical vision to what ships
• Leading platform strategy and delivery across diverse platform types, connecting long-term vision to what ships
• Working pragmatically to balance technology choices while delivering high-quality work within deadlines
• Advising clients on architecture, scalability and platform evolution, connecting technical decisions to product and business outcomes
• Collaborating on systems that involve the full ML lifecycle from data ingestion and preprocessing, to model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring
• Driving innovation by proactively surfacing new technical approaches and product solutions
• Leading or initiating formal feedback conversations with teams and clients via retrospectives
• Clearly articulating and documenting outcomes and driving forward action items
• Contributing to the health of your team and 8th Light’s culture by modeling our Values
• Designing and managing high-level technical roadmaps for large engagements
• Building your network and maintaining relationships with clients and other industry leaders within your domain
• Coaching client engineering teams, transferring knowledge and leveling up practices
• Influencing client CTOs and executive decisions. Planning and execute technical work that involves stakeholders outside of project boundaries such as across a client's technical organization
• Partner with account teams on planning, opportunity identification, stakeholder relationships, and pre-sales scope shaping
• Facilitating retrospectives, strategy sessions, and technical deep-dives to improve team and project outcomes
• Identifying, mitigating, and resolving blockers to team progress
• Contributing to 8th Light by serving as a mentor, leading or designing workshops internally or for clients, representing 8th Light in the tech community, or supporting our hiring processes
• Demonstrating leadership in scalable system design, modular architecture, and platform- or product-oriented development
• Bringing depth in testing strategies, observability, fault tolerance, and secure engineering practices
• Applying architectural patterns to evaluate tradeoffs and drive clear, documented design rationale

Qualifications

• Long-term repeated success on a variety of projects, typically over the course of 10+ years
• Trusted expert and leader, often called upon to guide ambiguous initiatives and architect scalable solutions
• Blend of deep consulting acumen, technical expertise, and product thinking that drives measurable and impactful outcomes
• Experience in building and shipping production-grade platforms
• Strong understanding of AI and agentic systems from prototype to production
• Experience in high-stakes consulting engagements across multiple language paradigms, stacks, ecosystems, and client industries
• Experience in building high-quality, maintainable software collaboratively
• Experience with a variety of programming languages and frameworks
• Track record of understanding, assessing, and embracing new tooling and trends within the software industry
• Experience in building or integrating AI/ML features into products and systems
• Experience in leading modernization and replatforming efforts
• Experience in facilitating alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Experience in providing mentorship and team support at scale
• Experience in collaboratively leading stakeholders to balance technical considerations with product and user needs
• Experience in actively seeking out and effectively giving feedback

Requirements

• Experience in platform engineering: building reusable software foundations, internal developer platforms, and infrastructure
• Experience in data engineering, including platforms like Databricks for data processing and analytics
• Experience in delivering production agentic systems, including RAG pipelines and agentic frameworks
• Experience in DevSecOps & DevOps
• Experience in MLOps
• Experience in Infrastructure as Code

Benefits

• A robust L&D program featuring unlimited access to thousands of books, courses, and expert-led training on the O'Reilly learning platform
• Annual financial stipend and time allotment for learning & development
• Coworking support for our global team
• Flexible PTO
• 12 weeks of new parent leave available for eligible employees