Principal Software Engineer

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

📋 Description

• Collaborate with a diverse range of clients, typically engaging with one or two each year.

• Quickly establish trust with clients by showcasing technical proficiency and comprehending their industry and goals.

• Lead platform engineering initiatives at the client level, linking long-term technical strategies to tangible results.

• Oversee platform strategy and execution across various platform types.

• Make pragmatic technology choices while ensuring the delivery of high-quality work within set deadlines.

• Provide guidance to clients on architecture, scalability, and platform development, aligning technical choices with product and business outcomes.

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

• Foster innovation by introducing new technical methods and product solutions.

• Lead or initiate formal feedback sessions through retrospectives.

• Clearly articulate and document outcomes while driving forward action items.

• Contribute to the team and organizational culture by exemplifying company values.

• Design and manage comprehensive technical roadmaps for significant engagements.

• Build networks and nurture relationships with clients and industry leaders.

• Coach client engineering teams, impart knowledge, and enhance practices.

• Influence decisions made by client CTOs and executives.

• Plan and implement technical initiatives involving stakeholders across a client's technical organization.

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

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

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

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

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

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

⛳️ Requirements

• Proven long-term success across various projects, typically spanning over 10 years.

• Strong consulting skills, technical expertise, and product-focused thinking.

• Experience in developing and delivering production-grade platforms, reusable foundations, tools, infrastructure, and workflows.

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

• Experience in executing high-stakes consulting engagements across multiple programming languages, technology stacks, ecosystems, and client sectors.

• Proven track record in leading delivery of production-grade software using Java, C#/.NET, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Go, Ruby, Scala, R, and SQL.

• Experience experimenting with AI development tools and converting experiments into faster, higher-quality outputs.

• History of understanding, evaluating, and adopting emerging software industry tools and trends.

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

• Proven experience in leading modernization and replatforming initiatives.

• Expertise in solving architecture-related challenges concerning scalability, security, reliability, performance, maintainability, and observability.

• Experience in aligning technical and non-technical stakeholders.

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

• Preferred experience in platform engineering, data engineering, Databricks, production agentic systems, RAG pipelines, vector search, LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen, n8n, DevSecOps, DevOps, MLOps, and Infrastructure as Code.

🏝️ Benefits

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

• Annual financial support and designated time for learning & development.

• Co-working support available for our global team.

• Flexible paid time off (PTO).

• 12 weeks of parental leave available for eligible employees.

• Access to co-working spaces for team members located outside hub cities.