Lead Software Engineer (Remote)

8th Light is a technology solutions provider headquartered in Chicago, dedicated to solving meaningful challenges for organizations. They are seeking a Lead Software Engineer who will lead software development projects, collaborate with clients, and contribute to the design and architecture of technology solutions while fostering a culture of mentorship and continuous learning.

Responsibilities:

• Making immediate contributions to projects, rapidly building trust with clients
• Working pragmatically to balance technology choices while delivering high-quality work within deadlines
• Leading architecture and software design discussions
• Collaborating on systems that involve the full ML lifecycle from data ingestion and preprocessing, to model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring
• Generating new potential solutions to challenges (technical and non-technical) in partnership with team members and clients
• 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
• Ensuring your team has a healthy, prioritized, estimated backlog
• Managing high-level project roadmaps as the team lead for large engagements
• Maintaining relationships with client technical leaders
• Regular syncs with the client to provide status updates, and for identifying and evaluating risks and presenting potential solutions
• 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

Requirements:

• 7+ years of experience in software development
• Successfully led high-stakes consulting engagements from discovery to production
• Built high-quality, maintainable software collaboratively, incrementally, and through an approach tailored towards the unique needs of the clients
• Written production-quality code using a variety of languages and frameworks, including but not limited to: Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Ruby, Scala, R, SQL, and Go
• Leveraged AI-assistive development tools for tasks like scaffolding, refactoring, debugging, test generation, and documentation
• 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
• Debugged and refactored pre-existing code to incrementally improve it
• Collaborated with teams using Git, MacOS/Linux, and CI/CD
• Remedied architecture-level concerns such as scalability, security, reliability, and performance
• Brought together people from different functions and perspectives in forums that encourage idea sharing, collaboration, and problem solving
• Made thoughtful recommendations and set direction in the face of ambiguity
• Mentored and shared knowledge with colleagues
• Actively sought out and effectively given feedback
• Communicated empathically with stakeholders and colleagues
• Collaboratively led stakeholders to balance technical considerations with product and user needs
• MLOps: including tools like LangChain for application development and managing the ML lifecycle
• Data Engineering: including platforms like Databricks for data processing and analytics
• DevSecOps & DevOps
• Infrastructure as Code