Principal Software Engineer- AI (Remote)
Principal Software Engineer- AI (Remote)
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Job Description
Who We Are
At 8th Light we bring life to the best ideas.
Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Chicago we are a technology solutions provider that partners with organisations to solve meaningful challenges and drive sustainable growth. From early-stage startups to global enterprises we work across industries to optimise our clients digital products through product strategy innovation experiential design AI solutions and deep engineering expertise.
Our commitment to quality means we deliver solutions were truly proud of while our curiosity sparks innovation and breakthrough thinking. 8th Lights thrive in an environment that champions continuous education fueling our growth through mentorship and hands-on work. We foster an open collaborative culture grounded in honesty that builds trust and believe true success is measured by the outcomes we create for our clients.
If this kind of work and our kind of people energises you youve found the right place.
Who You Are
Youve shown long-term repeated success on a variety of projects typically over the course of 10 years. You are a trusted expert and leader often called upon to guide ambiguous initiatives embed with clients and architect scalable AI-enabled solutions. You bring a blend of deep consulting acumen technical expertise and product thinking that drives measurable and impactful outcomes. You take a proactive experimentation-focused mindset towards innovation using data to inform your recommendations along the your previous experience you have:
- Demonstrated long-term success on high-stakes consulting engagements across multiple language paradigms stacks ecosystems technical environments and client industries
- Acted as a trusted partner to executives framing business challenges and connecting them to technical outcomes
- Led the development and delivery of production-grade software using a variety of languages and frameworks including but not limited to: Python Java JavaScript TypeScript React Ruby Scala R SQL and Go
- Evaluated and pragmatically applied AI-assistive development tools to accelerate delivery improve quality and deliver measurable outcomes without chasing hype
- A track record of understanding assessing and embracing new tooling and trends within the software industry
- Experience building or integrating AI/ML-powered features into products or systems (e.g. recommendation engines NLP models computer vision predictive analytics)
- Used context-appropriate automated testing to inform software design choices and catch bugs
- Successfully led modernisation efforts to align legacy systems with short and long-term business needs
- Remedied architecture-level concerns such as scalability security reliability and performance
- Facilitated alignment and collaboration across technical and non-technical stakeholders to move initiatives forward in the face of ambiguity and complexity while balancing technical considerations with product and user needs
- Actively sought out and effectively given feedback
- Collaboratively led stakeholders to balance technical considerations with product and user needs
- Mentored and supported teams at scale building trust improving practices and leaving organisations stronger and more self-sufficient
What Youll Do At 8th Light
As a go-to technologist and strategist within 8th Light youll work with a variety of clients typically one to two in a year while continuing to deepen your and our collective domain expertise over the course of your career with us. Youll be responsible for:
- Rapidly building trust with clients demonstrating technical expertise and understanding of their domain and objectives
- Framing ambiguous business problems as solvable workflows and systems earning leadership buy-in then design and build solutions that balance pragmatism with long-term scalability
- Guiding technical direction solving complex problems and demonstrating best practices while remaining deeply engaged within the codebase
- Working pragmatically to balance technology choices while delivering high-quality work within deadlines
- Collaborating on systems that involve the full ML lifecycle from data ingestion and preprocessing to model deployment integration and performance monitoring
- Delivering and advise on enterprise-grade AI systems including RAG pipelines vector search and agentic frameworks (e.g. LangChain LlamaIndex Crew AI AutoGen n8n) ensuring scalable production-ready solutions that empower developers and align with business outcomes.
- Driving innovation by proactively surfacing new technical approaches and product solutions
- Leading or initiating formal feedback conversations with teams and clients via retrospectives
- Contributing to the health of your team and 8th Lights culture by modelling our Values
- Designing and managing high-level technical roadmaps for large engagements
- Building your network and maintaining relationships with clients and other industry leaders within your domain
- Coaching client engineering teams transferring knowledge and leveling up practices
- Influencing client CTOs and executive decisions. Planning and executing technical work that involves stakeholders outside of project boundaries such as across a clients technical organization
- Participating in account planning; opportunity identification.
- Facilitating retrospectives strategy sessions and technical deep-dives to improve team and project outcomes
- Identifying mitigating and resolving blockers to team progress
- Contributing 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
- Demonstrating leadership in scalable system design modular architecture and platform- or product-oriented development.
- Bringing depth in testing strategies observability fault tolerance and secure engineering practices
- Applying architectural patterns to evaluate tradeoffs and drive clear documented design rationale
Strongly Preferred Skills
We work across many areas and encourage anyone with the experience listed above to apply. We would particularly like to encourage applicants with experience in the following areas:
- DevSecOps & DevOps
- MLOps
- Infrastructure as Code
- Data Engineering
Building a truly diverse equitable and inclusive workplace is an ongoing journey and were excited to keep learning and growing together. We have a proud tradition of hiring talented colleagues with real-world career experiences.
How Youll be Supported
At 8th Light we believe our people are our greatest asset. Their growth well-being and success shape our future.
Our wellness package is designed with the Whole YOU in mind and includes:
- A robust L&D programme with a learning budget and in-person learning opportunities
- Coworking support for our global team
- Flexible Annual Leave
- Transparent semi-annual promotion panel
See our full list of Benefits.
A Note on Compensation
At 8th Light we are committed to a compensation philosophy that is transparent fair and helps us attract and retain top talent in alignment with our companys strategic growth goals and clients needs.
We benchmark our salaries using Geographic Structures to establish competitive pay ranges within the regions where 8th Lights live. Our pay ranges for our Principal Engineering position in London is:
92898- 116122 GBP Annually
Reach out to for more relevant information pertaining to your local market.
8th Light is Remote-First
We are a distributed team across the United States Canada and the United most cases our consulting engagements do not require travel.
Whether you choose to work remotely or join us in person at one of our offices in Chicago or London were committed to supporting a strong team culture. For team members outside of those cities we offer access to coworking spaces to foster continued collaboration and connection across our global team.
We hope to see you apply!
#LI-Remote
Required Experience:
Staff IC
Employment Type
Full Time
