Principal Software Engineer (Remote)

8th Light is a technology solutions consultancy that partners with organizations from startups to large companies. They are seeking a Principal Software Engineer who will be responsible for leading platform engineering work, advising clients on architecture, and driving innovation while collaborating on machine learning systems.

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 success on a variety of projects
• Expertise in guiding ambiguous initiatives and architecting scalable solutions
• Experience 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