Principal Software Engineer

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

📋 Description

• Establish trust with clients by showcasing technical knowledge and comprehending their domain and objectives.

• Spearhead platform engineering initiatives at the client level, linking long-term technical vision to delivered results.

• Oversee platform strategy and execution across various platform types.

• Pragmatically balance technology choices while ensuring high-quality deliverables are met within deadlines.

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

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

• Introduce innovative technical methodologies and product solutions.

• Lead or initiate formal feedback discussions through retrospectives.

• Document outcomes and ensure action items are addressed.

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

• Develop and sustain relationships with clients and industry leaders.

• Mentor client engineering teams and enhance their practices.

• Influence decisions made by client CTOs and executives.

• Collaborate with account teams on planning, opportunity identification, stakeholder relationships, and shaping pre-sales scopes.

• Facilitate retrospectives, strategy discussions, and in-depth technical reviews.

• Identify, mitigate, and resolve obstacles.

• Provide internal mentorship, lead or design workshops, represent 8th Light within the tech community, and assist in recruitment efforts.

• Exhibit leadership in scalable system design, modular architecture, and development focused on platforms or products.

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

⛳️ Requirements

• Proven long-term success across a variety of projects, typically over a span of 10+ years.

• Extensive consulting experience, technical proficiency, and product-oriented mindset.

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

• Background in transitioning AI and agentic systems from prototype to production.

• Strong grasp of infrastructure, authentication, and observability principles.

• Experience delivering high-stakes consulting projects across diverse programming paradigms, stacks, ecosystems, and industries.

• Hands-on experience leading the delivery of production-grade software using Java, C#/.NET, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Go, Ruby, Scala, R, and SQL.

• Familiarity with AI development tools and AI/ML functionalities, including recommendation engines, NLP, computer vision, predictive analytics, RAG pipelines, and agents.

• Experience in leading modernization and replatforming initiatives.

• Capability to address architecture-level challenges concerning scalability, security, reliability, performance, maintainability, and observability.

• Proven ability to facilitate alignment among both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Experience in providing 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

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

• Annual financial allowance and designated time for learning and development.

• Support for coworking arrangements for the global team.

• Flexible paid time off (PTO).

• 12 weeks of parental leave for eligible employees.

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