Principal Software Engineer

Northern Light•Somerville, MA

12d•$175,000 - $215,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Northern Light is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to begin with its content pipeline and expand into ownership across the full platform. The pipeline ingests content from more than a hundred vendor feeds, standardizes it, and makes it searchable for customers. The role can also extend across platform services, search, AI features, and customer portals. The platform, SinglePoint, combines licensed publisher and research-vendor content with customers’ internal documents, then normalizes, enriches, and indexes that material in customer-specific search databases. It serves the content through customer portals with search, analytics, NLP enrichment, AI summarization, and Q&A. The platform is established and revenue-earning, and the role will help modernize and improve it with AI-centered development. The position involves delivering production-ready changes end to end: understanding existing systems, implementing and validating replacements, and ensuring the previous behavior or system is properly retired. The current technology estate includes Python, Rust, PHP, React, and legacy Perl. New backend work is mostly Python and Rust, and portal work uses PHP and React. No specific programming language is required, but the role includes reading Perl. This is a full-time hybrid role in the Boston, Massachusetts area, with regular time at the Somerville office and Eastern Time working hours. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States; visa sponsorship is not available.

Requirements

Track record of delivering and maintaining production software used by real users.
Ability to read, understand, and safely change unfamiliar and legacy systems.
Strong data pipeline instincts, including building reliable, repeatable pipelines and verifying parity with existing pipelines before cutover.
Operational comfort with containers, CI/CD, and determining whether changes are live in production.
Regular use of AI coding assistants, LLMs, and agents, with ideas for using them to improve pipelines.
Collaborative approach, including sharing ideas, documenting learning, and helping teammates improve.
Good judgment about when to address root causes and when to deliver a narrower change while recording technical debt.
Willingness to read Perl code.
Authorization to work in the United States; visa sponsorship is not available.

Nice To Haves

Experience building production systems with LLMs, embeddings, or AI agents.
Experience with web crawling and scraping at scale, such as Scrapy or an equivalent.
Experience with search and information retrieval, including indexing, relevance, and faceting.
Experience with durable workflow engines such as Temporal or Airflow.
Rust experience.
Experience with Kubernetes, Helm, or Terraform.
PHP experience.
Experience working with licensed third-party data feeds.

Responsibilities

Build and maintain ingestion for new vendor feeds and customers, from vendor delivery through to documents appearing in customer search results.
Shape the transformation of vendor content into a consistent, reliable format.
Migrate legacy pipelines to the current stack, including the ongoing Perl-to-Python effort and movement toward containerized, contract-bound services.
Help replace convention-driven job scheduling with explicit, durable workflows.
Investigate production content problems and fix their root causes.
Apply ML, NLP, LLMs, and AI tooling to classify, enrich, and validate content and to accelerate development and migrations.
Work across the full stack, from backend services to customer portals built with PHP and React/TypeScript.
Deliver changes through production, verify them against the behavior they replace, and ensure replaced systems are switched off.