Principal Software Engineer (US-Remote)

8th Light is a technology solutions provider that partners with organizations to solve meaningful challenges and drive sustainable growth. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will guide technical direction, solve complex problems, and advise clients on architecture and scalability while collaborating on systems involving the full ML lifecycle.

Responsibilities:

• Rapidly building trust with clients, demonstrating technical expertise and understanding of their domain and objectives
• Guiding technical direction, solving complex problems, and demonstrating best practices while remaining deeply engaged within the codebase
• 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
• Participating in account planning; opportunity identification
• 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

Requirements:

• Demonstrated long-term success on high-stakes consulting engagements across multiple language paradigms, stacks, ecosystems, technical environments, and client industries
• Built high-quality, maintainable software collaboratively, incrementally, and through an approach tailored towards the unique needs of the clients you've served
• Led the development and delivery of production-grade software using a variety of languages and frameworks, including but not limited to: Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Ruby, Scala, R, SQL, and Go
• Evaluated and strategically applied AI-assistive development tools to accelerate delivery and improve quality
• A track record of understanding, assessing, and embracing new tooling and trends within the software industry
• Experience building or integrating AI/ML-powered features into products or systems (e.g., recommendation engines, NLP models, computer vision, predictive analytics)
• Used context-appropriate automated testing to inform software design choices and catch bugs
• Successfully led modernization efforts to align legacy systems with short and long-term business needs
• Remedied architecture-level concerns such as scalability, security, reliability, and performance
• Facilitated alignment and collaboration across technical and non-technical stakeholders to move initiatives forward in the face of ambiguity and complexity while balancing technical considerations with product and user needs
• Provided mentorship and team support at scale, while sharing knowledge and improving team practices
• Actively sought out and effectively given feedback
• Collaboratively led stakeholders to balance technical considerations with product and user needs
• Rapidly building trust with clients, demonstrating technical expertise and understanding of their domain and objectives
• Guiding technical direction, solving complex problems, and demonstrating best practices while remaining deeply engaged within the codebase
• 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
• Participating in account planning; opportunity identification
• 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
• Delivering and advising on enterprise-grade AI systems, including RAG pipelines, vector search, and agentic frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, Crew AI, AutoGen, n8n), ensuring scalable, production-ready solutions that empower developers and align with business outcomes
• DevSecOps & DevOps
• MLOps
• Infrastructure as Code
• Data Engineering: including platforms like Databricks for data processing and analytics