Principal Software Engineer (Remote)

8th Light

6h • $151,535 - $220,881 • Remote

About The Position

8th Light is a technology solutions consultancy that partners with organizations ranging from early-stage startups to large enterprises to solve software challenges. The Principal Software Engineer serves as a go-to technologist and strategist, working with a variety of clients—typically one to two per year—and helping deepen the company’s and clients’ domain expertise. The role combines consulting, technical leadership, platform engineering, product thinking, and delivery of measurable outcomes.

The engineer leads platform strategy and delivery, advises clients on architecture and platform evolution, and connects technical decisions to product and business outcomes. The work may span AI and agentic systems, machine learning, data platforms, modernization, and diverse languages, frameworks, and client industries. The role also involves guiding ambiguous initiatives, developing technical roadmaps, coaching client and internal teams, and contributing to 8th Light’s culture and community.

This is a remote-first company with a distributed team across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Team members hired into hubs participate in regular coworking and community activities; coworkers outside hubs can access coworking spaces. Consulting engagements generally do not require travel.

Requirements

• Typically 10 or more years of repeated success across a variety of projects.
• Experience building and shipping production-grade platforms, including reusable foundations, tools, infrastructure, and workflows that help teams work faster and more reliably.
• Experience taking AI and agentic systems from prototype to production, with an understanding of infrastructure, authentication, and observability.
• Experience delivering high-stakes consulting engagements across multiple language paradigms, technology stacks, ecosystems, and client industries.
• Ability to build high-quality, maintainable software collaboratively and incrementally, adapting approaches to client needs.
• Experience leading development and delivery of production-grade software using languages and frameworks such as Java, C#/.NET, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Go, Ruby, Scala, R, Rust, and SQL.
• Experience experimenting with AI development tools and applying them to improve delivery speed and quality.
• Ability to assess and adopt relevant tools and trends in the software industry.
• Experience building or integrating AI/ML features such as recommendation engines, NLP, computer vision, predictive analytics, RAG pipelines, and agents.
• Experience leading modernization and replatforming efforts to align legacy systems with business needs.
• Experience leading solutions to architecture-level challenges involving scalability, security, reliability, performance, maintainability, and observability.
• Ability to align technical and non-technical stakeholders and move initiatives forward through ambiguity and complexity.
• Experience mentoring and supporting teams at scale, sharing knowledge, and improving team practices.
• Ability to balance technical considerations with product and user needs in collaboration with stakeholders.
• Willingness and ability to seek and give feedback effectively.

Nice To Haves

• Platform engineering experience, including building reusable software foundations, internal developer platforms, and infrastructure for other teams.
• Data engineering experience, including platforms such as Databricks for processing and analytics.
• Experience delivering production agentic systems, including RAG pipelines, vector search, and frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen, and n8n.
• DevSecOps and DevOps experience.
• MLOps experience.
• Infrastructure as Code experience.

Responsibilities

• Build trust with clients by demonstrating technical expertise and understanding their domains and objectives.
• Drive platform engineering work at the client level, connecting long-term technical vision to shipped work.
• Lead platform strategy and delivery across diverse platform types.
• Balance technology choices pragmatically while delivering high-quality work within deadlines.
• Advise clients on architecture, scalability, and platform evolution, relating technical decisions to product and business outcomes.
• Collaborate on systems spanning the machine-learning lifecycle, from data ingestion and preprocessing through model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring.
• Proactively surface technical approaches and product solutions to drive innovation.
• Lead or initiate feedback conversations with teams and clients through retrospectives.
• Document outcomes clearly and drive action items forward.
• Contribute to team health and company culture by modeling 8th Light’s values.
• Design and manage high-level technical roadmaps for large engagements.
• Build and maintain relationships with clients and industry leaders in relevant domains.
• Coach client engineering teams, transfer knowledge, and improve practices.
• Influence client CTOs and executive decisions, and plan and execute technical work involving stakeholders across client organizations.
• Partner with account teams on planning, opportunity identification, stakeholder relationships, and presales 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 through mentorship, workshops, community representation, or hiring support.
• Demonstrate leadership in scalable system design, modular architecture, and platform- or product-oriented development.
• Apply strong testing, observability, fault-tolerance, and secure-engineering practices.
• Use architectural patterns to evaluate tradeoffs and document design rationale.

Benefits

• Robust learning and development program with unlimited access to thousands of books, courses, and expert-led training through O’Reilly.
• Annual financial stipend and time allotment for learning and development.
• Coworking support for the global team.
• Flexible paid time off.
• 12 weeks of new parent leave for eligible employees.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed