Principal Software Engineer (Remote)

8th Light is a technology solutions consultancy that partners with organizations to tackle complex software challenges. The Principal Software Engineer will lead platform engineering initiatives, advise clients on technical architecture, and drive innovation while collaborating closely with client teams.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering
• Proven track record of building and shipping production-grade platforms
• Experience taking 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 and incrementally
• Experience leading the development and delivery of production-grade software using a variety of languages and frameworks, including but not limited to: Java, C#/.NET, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Go, Ruby, Scala, R, and SQL
• Experience actively experimenting with AI development tools
• 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 leading and delivering solutions to architecture-level problems
• 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
• Platform engineering: building reusable software foundations, internal developer platforms, and infrastructure that other teams build on
• Data Engineering: including platforms like Databricks for data processing and analytics
• Delivering production agentic systems, including RAG pipelines, vector search, and agentic frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen, and n8n
• DevSecOps & DevOps
• MLOps
• Infrastructure as Code