Principal Software Engineer (Remote)

Who You Are

• Built and shipped production-grade platforms: the reusable foundations, tools, infrastructure, and workflows that help other teams shift faster and more reliably
• Taken AI and agentic systems from prototype to production, with a strong understanding of infrastructure, authentication, and observability
• Delivered on high-stakes consulting engagements across multiple language paradigms, stacks, ecosystems, and client industries
• Built high-quality, maintainable software collaboratively, incrementally, and through an approach tailored towards the unique needs of the clients you've served
• Led the development and delivery of production-grade software using a variety of languages and frameworks, including but not limited to: Java, C#/.NET, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Go, Ruby, Scala, R, and SQL
• Actively experimented with AI development tools and translated that experimentation into faster, higher-quality delivery for your teams
• A track record of understanding, assessing, and embracing new tooling and trends within the software industry
• Built or integrated AI/ML features into products and systems, including recommendation engines, NLP, computer vision, predictive analytics, RAG pipelines, and agents
• Successfully led modernization and replatforming efforts to align legacy systems with short and long-term business needs
• Led and delivered solutions to architecture-level problems including scalability, security, reliability, performance, maintainability, and observability
• Facilitated alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders to move initiatives forward through ambiguity and complexity
• Provided mentorship and team support at scale, while sharing knowledge and improving team practices
• Collaboratively led stakeholders to balance technical considerations with product and user needs
• Actively sought out and effectively given feedback

What You'll Do

• Rapidly build trust with clients, demonstrating technical expertise and understanding of their domain and objectives
• Drive platform engineering work at the client level, connecting long-term technical vision to what ships
• Lead platform strategy and delivery across diverse platform types, connecting long-term vision to what ships
• Work pragmatically to balance technology choices while delivering high-quality work within deadlines
• Advise clients on architecture, scalability and platform evolution, connecting technical decisions to product and business outcomes
• Collaborate on systems that involve the full ML lifecycle from data ingestion and preprocessing, to model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring
• Drive innovation by proactively surfacing new technical approaches and product solutions
• Lead or initiate formal feedback conversations with teams and clients via retrospectives
• Clearly articulate and document outcomes and drive forward action items
• Contribute to the health of your team and 8th Light's culture by modeling our Values
• Design and manage high-level technical roadmaps for large engagements
• Build your network and maintain relationships with clients and other industry leaders within your domain
• Coach client engineering teams, transferring knowledge and leveling up practices
• Influence client CTOs and executive decisions
• Plan and execute technical work that involves stakeholders outside of project boundaries such as across a client's technical organization
• Partner with account teams on planning, opportunity identification, stakeholder relationships, and pre-sales scope shaping
• Facilitate retrospectives, strategy sessions, and technical deep-dives to improve team and project outcomes
• Identify, mitigate, and resolve blockers to team progress
• Contribute to 8th Light by serving as a mentor, leading or designing workshops internally or for clients, representing 8th Light in the tech community, or supporting our hiring processes
• Demonstrate leadership in scalable system design, modular architecture, and platform- or product-oriented development
• Bring depth in testing strategies, observability, fault tolerance, and secure engineering practices
• Apply architectural patterns to evaluate tradeoffs and drive clear, documented design rationale

Strongly Preferred Skills

• Platform engineering: building reusable software foundations, internal developer platforms, and infrastructure that other teams build on
• Data Engineering: including platforms like Databricks for data processing and analytics
• Delivering production agentic systems, including RAG pipelines, vector search, and agentic frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen, and n8n
• DevSecOps & DevOps
• MLOps
• Infrastructure as Code

How You'll Be Supported

• A robust L&D program featuring unlimited access to thousands of books, courses, and expert-led training on the O'Reilly learning platform
• Annual financial stipend and time allotment for learning & development
• Coworking support for our global team
• Flexible PTO
• 12 weeks of new parent leave available for eligible employees

Pay

Our pay ranges for our Principal Engineer position within our four US structures are as follows:

• Structure 1 (Denver, Tampa Metro, Philadelphia Metro, Ohio, Wisconsin): $151,535–$189,418 USD
• Structure 2 (Chicago Metro, Miami Metro, Philadelphia Metro, Raleigh Metro): $159,240–$199,050 USD
• Structure 3 (Austin Metro, Boston Metro, DC Metro): $169,513–$211,892 USD
• Structure 4 (Los Angeles, Seattle, New York City): $176,705–$220,881 USD