Principal Software Engineer (Remote)

8th Light

1d • $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 build software, platforms, and engineering solutions. The Principal Software Engineer serves as a go-to technologist and strategist, typically working with one or two clients per year. The role combines consulting expertise, technical leadership, and product thinking to deliver durable, measurable outcomes and deepen domain expertise.

The engineer builds trust with clients, leads platform strategy and delivery, advises on architecture and platform evolution, and connects long-term technical vision to shipped work. They guide complex initiatives, help clients make technical decisions tied to product and business outcomes, and coach engineering teams. The role also contributes to 8th Light’s culture through mentorship, workshops, hiring support, and engagement with the technology community.

The position works across diverse languages, frameworks, platforms, and client industries. Areas of focus include platform engineering, AI and agentic systems, machine learning lifecycle work, modernization, scalable architecture, reliability, security, performance, maintainability, and observability. The role is remote-first, with hubs and coworking support available. 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 understanding of infrastructure, authentication, and observability.
• Experience delivering high-stakes consulting engagements across multiple language paradigms, stacks, ecosystems, and client industries.
• Ability to build high-quality, maintainable software collaboratively and incrementally, tailoring the approach to client needs.
• Experience leading the 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 the results to improve delivery speed and quality.
• Track record of understanding, assessing, and adopting new software-industry tools and trends.
• Experience building or integrating AI/ML product or system 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 problems involving scalability, security, reliability, performance, maintainability, and observability.
• Ability to align technical and non-technical stakeholders and advance initiatives through ambiguity and complexity.
• Experience providing mentorship and team support at scale, sharing knowledge, and improving team practices.
• Ability to balance technical considerations with product and user needs in collaboration with stakeholders.
• Experience actively seeking and effectively giving feedback.

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 data 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

• Rapidly build trust with clients by demonstrating technical expertise and understanding their domain and objectives.
• Drive platform engineering work at the client level, connecting long-term technical vision to delivered 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, connecting 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 new technical approaches and product solutions to drive innovation.
• Lead or initiate formal feedback conversations with teams and clients, including retrospectives.
• Articulate and document outcomes clearly and drive action items forward.
• Contribute to team health and 8th Light’s culture by modeling company values.
• Design and manage high-level technical roadmaps for large engagements.
• Build and maintain relationships with clients and industry leaders within the relevant domain.
• Coach client engineering teams, transfer knowledge, and improve engineering practices.
• Influence client CTOs and executive decisions, and plan technical work involving stakeholders across the client’s technical organization.
• 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 mentoring, designing or leading workshops, representing the company in the technology community, or supporting hiring.
• Demonstrate leadership in scalable system design, modular architecture, and platform- or product-oriented development.
• Apply depth in testing strategies, observability, fault tolerance, and secure engineering practices.
• Use architectural patterns to evaluate tradeoffs and document design rationale.

Benefits

• Unlimited access to thousands of books, courses, and expert-led training through the O’Reilly learning platform.
• Annual financial stipend and time allotment for learning and development.
• Coworking support for the global team.
• Flexible PTO.
• 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