Principal Software Engineer

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

📋 Description

• Establish trust with clients while showcasing technical expertise and understanding of their domain and goals.

• Propel platform engineering efforts at the client level by linking long-term technical vision to executed work.

• Direct platform strategy and delivery across various platform types.

• Pragmatically balance technology selections while ensuring the delivery of high-quality work on schedule.

• Counsel clients on architecture, scalability, and the evolution of platforms.

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

• Introduce innovative technical methods and product solutions.

• Lead or initiate structured feedback dialogues through retrospectives.

• Clearly articulate and document outcomes while driving action items.

• Design and oversee high-level technical roadmaps for significant engagements.

• Cultivate and sustain relationships with clients and industry leaders.

• Mentor client engineering teams and facilitate knowledge transfer.

• Influence decisions made by client CTOs and executives.

• Collaborate with account teams on planning, identifying opportunities, managing stakeholder relationships, and shaping pre-sales scope.

• Facilitate retrospectives, strategic sessions, and technical deep-dives.

• Identify, mitigate, and resolve obstacles.

• Mentor, lead, or design workshops, represent 8th Light within the tech community, and assist in recruitment processes.

• Exhibit leadership in scalable system design, modular architecture, and platform- or product-oriented development.

• Implement testing, observability, fault-tolerance, secure engineering, and architectural practices.

⛳️ Requirements

• Generally, 10+ years of sustained success across a variety of projects.

• Trusted expert and leader capable of guiding ambiguous initiatives and architecting scalable solutions.

• Profound consulting acumen, technical expertise, and product-oriented thinking.

• Experience in building and deploying production-grade platforms, reusable foundations, tools, infrastructure, and workflows.

• Proven track record of transitioning AI and agentic systems from prototype to production, including infrastructure, authentication, and observability.

• Experience delivering high-stakes consulting projects across various programming languages, stacks, ecosystems, and client sectors.

• Proven ability to collaboratively and incrementally develop high-quality, maintainable software.

• Experience leading production-grade software delivery using languages and frameworks such as Java, C#/.NET, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Go, Ruby, Scala, R, and SQL.

• Familiarity with experimenting with AI development tools and leveraging them to enhance delivery.

• Ability to evaluate and adopt new software-industry tools and trends.

• Experience in developing or integrating AI/ML features including recommendation engines, NLP, computer vision, predictive analytics, RAG pipelines, and agents.

• Background in leading modernization and replatforming initiatives.

• Experience resolving architecture-level challenges related to scalability, security, reliability, performance, maintainability, and observability.

• Capacity to align technical and non-technical stakeholders through ambiguity and complexity.

• Experience providing mentorship and team support on a large scale.

• Strongly preferred: platform engineering, data engineering including Databricks, production agentic systems, RAG pipelines, vector search, LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen, n8n, DevSecOps, DevOps, MLOps, and Infrastructure as Code.

🏝️ Benefits

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

• An annual financial stipend and designated time for learning & development.

• Coworking support for our global team.

• Flexible Paid Time Off (PTO).

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