Principal Software Engineer

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

📋 Description

• Quickly establishing trust with clients by showcasing technical knowledge and understanding of their objectives and domain.

• Leading technical direction, addressing complex challenges, and exemplifying best practices while remaining actively engaged in the codebase.

• Pragmatically balancing technology selections to ensure high-quality deliverables within set deadlines.

• Offering advice to clients on architecture, scalability, and platform evolution, linking technical choices to product and business results.

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

• Fostering innovation by proactively identifying new technical methods and product solutions.

• Initiating or leading formal feedback discussions with teams and clients through retrospectives.

• Clearly documenting and articulating outcomes while advancing action items.

• Contributing to the well-being of your team and 8th Light’s culture by exemplifying our Values.

• Designing and overseeing high-level technical roadmaps for significant engagements.

• Expanding your network and nurturing relationships with clients and industry leaders within your field.

• Coaching client engineering teams, transferring knowledge, and enhancing practices.

• Influencing decisions made by client CTOs and executives, planning and executing technical work involving stakeholders beyond project boundaries, including a client's technical organization.

• Engaging in account planning and identifying opportunities.

• Facilitating retrospectives, strategy sessions, and technical deep-dives to enhance team and project outcomes.

• Identifying, mitigating, and resolving obstacles to team progress.

• Contributing to 8th Light by mentoring, leading or designing workshops internally or for clients, representing 8th Light in the tech community, or assisting with our hiring processes.

• Demonstrating leadership in scalable system design, modular architecture, and product-oriented development.

• Bringing expertise in testing strategies, observability, fault tolerance, and secure engineering practices.

• Applying architectural patterns to assess trade-offs and drive clear, well-documented design rationale.

⛳️ Requirements

• Proven long-term success in high-stakes consulting engagements across diverse language paradigms, stacks, ecosystems, technical settings, and client industries.

• Experience in collaboratively building high-quality, maintainable software incrementally, tailored to the specific needs of the clients served.

• Led the development and delivery of production-grade software using various languages and frameworks, including but not limited to: Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Ruby, Scala, R, SQL, and Go.

• Evaluated and strategically utilized AI-assistive development tools to enhance delivery speed and quality.

• A history of understanding, assessing, and adopting new tools and trends within the software industry.

• Experience in building or integrating AI/ML-powered features into products or systems (e.g., recommendation engines, NLP models, computer vision, predictive analytics).

• Utilized context-appropriate automated testing to inform software design decisions and detect bugs.

• Successfully led modernization initiatives to align legacy systems with both short-term and long-term business requirements.

• Addressed architecture-level issues such as scalability, security, reliability, and performance.

• Facilitated alignment and collaboration among technical and non-technical stakeholders to advance initiatives amidst ambiguity and complexity while reconciling technical considerations with product and user needs.

• Provided mentorship and team support at scale, sharing knowledge and enhancing team practices.

• Actively sought out and effectively provided feedback.

• Collaboratively guided stakeholders to balance technical considerations with product and user needs.

🏝️ 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 allocated time for learning & development.

• Coworking support for our global team.

• Flexible PTO.

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