Remote opportunity at
8th LightPrincipal Software Engineer (Remote)
8th Light, a technology solutions consultancy founded in 2006 and headquartered in Chicago, seeks a remote Principal Software Engineer to join its distributed team. The company…
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About This Role
8th Light, a technology solutions consultancy founded in 2006 and headquartered in Chicago, seeks a remote Principal Software Engineer to join its distributed team. The company partners with organizations ranging from early-stage startups to global enterprises to build agentic products, platforms, and scalable software solutions. In this role, you will act as a key technologist and strategist, typically engaging with one to two clients per year to guide complex initiatives,…
Job Description
8th Light, a technology solutions consultancy founded in 2006 and headquartered in Chicago, seeks a remote Principal Software Engineer to join its distributed team. The company partners with organizations ranging from early-stage startups to global enterprises to build agentic products, platforms, and scalable software solutions. In this role, you will act as a key technologist and strategist, typically engaging with one to two clients per year to guide complex initiatives, architect reliable systems, and connect technical execution to overarching business outcomes.
This position suits an experienced technical leader with a background in consulting, platform engineering, and product development who thrives in collaborative, transparent environments. 8th Light operates as a remote-first organization with hubs in Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle, offering coworking support, flexible paid time off, and continuous learning opportunities.
Responsibilities
- Build rapid trust with clients by demonstrating deep technical expertise and understanding of their objectives
- Drive platform engineering and strategy across diverse platform types, connecting long-term technical vision to deliverables
- Advise clients on architecture, scalability, security, reliability, performance, maintainability, and observability
- Work pragmatically to balance technical choices while delivering high-quality work within established deadlines
- Collaborate on systems involving the full machine learning lifecycle from data ingestion to model deployment and monitoring
- Design and manage high-level technical roadmaps for large client engagements
- Coach client engineering teams to transfer knowledge and improve engineering practices
- Influence client executives and CTOs while partnering with account teams on planning and pre-sales scope shaping
- Facilitate retrospectives, strategy sessions, and technical deep-dives to resolve blockers and improve project outcomes
Requirements
- Demonstrated long-term repeated success on various projects over the course of 10 plus years
- Experience building and shipped production-grade platforms, foundations, tools, infrastructure, and workflows
- Experience taking artificial intelligence and agentic systems from prototype to production
- Delivered high-stakes consulting engagements across multiple language paradigms, stacks, ecosystems, and industries
- Proficiency in developing software using languages and frameworks such as Java, C#/.NET, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Go, Ruby, Scala, R, and SQL
- Experience building or integrating AI and machine learning features into products, including recommendation engines, NLP, computer vision, predictive analytics, RAG pipelines, and agents
- Proven ability to lead modernization and replatforming efforts to align legacy systems with business needs
Qualifications
- Experience in platform engineering, building internal developer platforms, and infrastructure
- Experience in data engineering utilizing platforms such as Databricks
- Experience delivering production agentic systems and RAG pipelines, vector search, and agentic frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen, and n8n
- Experience in DevSecOps, DevOps, MLOps, and Infrastructure as Code
Core Skills
Benefits
- Unlimited access to books, courses, and expert-led training on the O'Reilly learning platform
- 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
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this position remote?
Yes, this is a remote-first role within a distributed team across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
What is the employment type?
The posting specifies a full-time employment type.
What salary does this position offer?
Specific salary figures depend on the candidate's geographic region, with US salary ranges for this role spanning from $151,535 to $220,881 USD across four defined geographic structures.
What travel is required for this role?
In most cases, consulting engagements for this position do not require travel.
Sample Interview Questions
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