Principal Software Engineer

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

📋 Description

• Establish trust with clients while showcasing technical proficiency and understanding of their industry and goals.

• Lead platform engineering initiatives at the client level, aligning technical vision with tangible results.

• Direct platform strategy and execution across a variety of platform types.

• Navigate technology selections while delivering superior quality work within set timelines.

• Provide guidance to clients on architecture, scalability, and the evolution of their platforms.

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

• Introduce innovative technical solutions and product approaches.

• Initiate or lead formal feedback discussions through retrospectives.

• Document results and drive follow-up actions.

• Design and manage comprehensive technical roadmaps for significant projects.

• Cultivate and sustain relationships with clients and industry influencers.

• Mentor client engineering teams and enhance their practices.

• Influence decisions made by client CTOs and executives.

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

• Facilitate retrospectives, strategy discussions, and technical deep-dives.

• Identify, mitigate, and resolve obstacles.

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

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

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

⛳️ Requirements

• Generally, 10+ years of consistent success across a diverse range of projects.

• Profound consulting skills, technical knowledge, and product-oriented thinking.

• Proven experience in building and delivering production-grade platforms, reusable foundations, tools, infrastructure, and workflows.

• Familiarity with taking AI and agentic systems from prototype to production, encompassing infrastructure, authentication, and observability.

• Experience managing high-stakes consulting projects across various programming languages, frameworks, ecosystems, and industries.

• Proficient in Java, C#/.NET, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Go, Ruby, Scala, R, and SQL.

• Experience experimenting with AI development tools.

• Familiarity with building or integrating AI/ML features, such as recommendation engines, NLP, computer vision, predictive analytics, RAG pipelines, and agents.

• Experience leading modernization and replatforming initiatives.

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

• Experience in facilitating alignment between technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Proven ability to provide mentorship and team support at scale.

• Strongly preferred: expertise in 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

• Unlimited access to thousands of books, courses, and expert-led training on the O'Reilly learning platform.

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

• Coworking support for the global team.

• Flexible PTO.

• 12 weeks of new parent leave for eligible employees.

• Access to coworking spaces for team members located outside hub cities.

• Remote-first distributed work environment.

• In most cases, consulting engagements do not require travel.