Principal Software Engineer (Remote)

8th Light is a technology solutions provider headquartered in Chicago, focusing on optimizing digital products through innovation and engineering expertise. The Principal Software Engineer will guide technical direction, solve complex problems, and collaborate with clients to deliver high-quality software solutions while mentoring teams and driving innovation.

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