Lead Software Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Make immediate contributions to projects and quickly establish trust with clients.

• Work pragmatically to balance technology selections while delivering high-quality results within deadlines.

• Lead discussions on architecture and software design.

• Collaborate on systems encompassing the entire ML lifecycle, from data ingestion and preprocessing to model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring.

• Generate a range of technical and non-technical solutions alongside team members and clients.

• Lead or initiate formal feedback discussions through retrospectives.

• Clearly articulate and document outcomes while driving action items forward.

• Contribute to team well-being and 8th Light’s culture by exemplifying company values.

• Ensure the team maintains a healthy, prioritized, and estimated backlog.

• Oversee high-level project roadmaps for significant engagements.

• Foster relationships with client technical leaders.

• Conduct regular client syncs, offering status updates, identifying and evaluating risks, and presenting potential solutions.

• Identify, mitigate, and resolve obstacles to team progress.

• Mentor colleagues, lead or design workshops, represent 8th Light in the tech community, or assist in hiring processes.

⛳️ Requirements

• Typically possess 7+ years of proven success across a variety of projects.

• Successfully led high-stakes consulting engagements from initial discovery to production.

• Extensive software development expertise enabling immediate project impact.

• Experience in production-quality coding with languages and frameworks such as Java, C#/.NET, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Go, Ruby, Scala, R, and SQL.

• Experience utilizing AI-assisted development tools for scaffolding, refactoring, debugging, test generation, and documentation.

• Experience in building or integrating AI/ML-powered features like recommendation engines, NLP models, computer vision, or predictive analytics.

• Familiarity with context-appropriate automated testing.

• Experience debugging and refactoring existing code.

• Experience collaborating with Git, MacOS/Linux, and CI/CD.

• Understanding scalability, security, reliability, and performance issues at the architectural level.

• Ability to unite individuals from various functions and perspectives for collaboration and problem-solving.

• Capability to make informed recommendations and set direction in ambiguous situations.

• Experience in mentoring and knowledge-sharing.

• Ability to give and receive feedback effectively.

• Empathetic communication skills with stakeholders and colleagues.

• Ability to collaboratively balance technical considerations with product and user needs.

• Strongly preferred: experience in platform engineering, data engineering including Databricks, production agentic systems with RAG pipelines/vector search, and frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen, or n8n, as well as DevSecOps/DevOps, MLOps, and Infrastructure as Code.

🏝️ Benefits

• A comprehensive L&D program offering unlimited access to thousands of books, courses, and expert-led training on the O'Reilly learning platform.

• Annual financial stipend and time allocation for learning & development.

• Coworking support for our global team.

• Flexible PTO.

• 12 weeks of new parent leave available for eligible employees.