[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 executing technical work that involves stakeholders outside of project boundaries
• Partnering 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

• 10+ years of experience with long-term repeated success on a variety of projects
• Expertise in guiding ambiguous initiatives and architecting scalable solutions
• Deep consulting acumen, technical expertise, and product thinking
• Experience building and shipping production-grade platforms
• Understanding of AI and agentic systems from prototype to production
• Experience delivering high-stakes consulting engagements across multiple language paradigms, stacks, ecosystems, and client industries
• Experience building high-quality, maintainable software collaboratively
• Experience leading the development and delivery of production-grade software using various languages and frameworks
• Track record of understanding, assessing, and embracing new tooling and trends within the software industry
• Experience building or integrating AI/ML features into products and systems
• Experience leading modernization and replatforming efforts
• Experience facilitating alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Experience providing mentorship and team support at scale
• Experience collaboratively leading stakeholders to balance technical considerations with product and user needs
• Experience actively seeking out and effectively giving feedback

Requirements

• Experience with Java, C#/.NET, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Go, Ruby, Scala, R, Rust, and SQL
• Experience with platform engineering, building reusable software foundations, and internal developer platforms
• Experience with data engineering platforms like Databricks
• Experience delivering production agentic systems, including RAG pipelines and agentic frameworks
• Experience with DevSecOps, DevOps, and MLOps
• Experience with 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