Principal Software Engineer

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

📋 Description

• Establish trust with clients and gain insight into their domains and goals.

• Drive platform engineering initiatives and align long-term technical vision with delivered outcomes.

• Oversee platform strategy and execution across various platform types.

• Balance technology selections while ensuring timely delivery of high-quality work.

• Provide guidance to clients on architecture, scalability, and platform advancement.

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

• Introduce innovative technical methods and product solutions.

• Lead discussions on feedback, retrospectives, strategy sessions, and technical deep-dives.

• Record outcomes and drive the necessary action items.

• Design and oversee comprehensive technical roadmaps for large-scale projects.

• Coach client engineering teams and facilitate knowledge transfer.

• Influence decisions made by client CTOs and executives.

• Partner with account teams for planning, identifying opportunities, nurturing stakeholder relationships, and shaping pre-sales scope.

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

• Mentor within the organization, lead or design workshops, represent 8th Light in the technology community, and support recruitment efforts.

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

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

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 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.

• Experience in advancing AI and agentic systems from prototype to production, including infrastructure, authentication, and observability.

• Proven track record in delivering high-stakes consulting projects across various programming languages, stacks, ecosystems, and client industries.

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

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

• Proven experience in leading modernization and replatforming initiatives.

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

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

• Experience mentoring teams and enhancing team practices.

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

• Annual financial allowance and time dedicated to learning & 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.