Principal Software Engineer

• Work with a variety of clients, typically one to two in a year
• Rapidly build trust with clients and understand their domains and objectives
• Drive platform engineering work and lead platform strategy and delivery
• Balance technology choices while delivering high-quality work within deadlines
• Advise clients on architecture, scalability, and platform evolution
• Collaborate across the full ML lifecycle, from data ingestion and preprocessing through model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring
• Surface new technical approaches and product solutions
• Lead feedback conversations, retrospectives, strategy sessions, and technical deep-dives
• Articulate and document outcomes and drive action items
• Design and manage high-level technical roadmaps for large engagements
• Coach client engineering teams and transfer knowledge
• Influence client CTOs and executive decisions
• Partner with account teams on planning, opportunity identification, stakeholder relationships, and pre-sales scope shaping
• Identify, mitigate, and resolve blockers
• Mentor internally, lead or design workshops, represent 8th Light in the tech community, and support hiring processes
• Demonstrate leadership in scalable system design, modular architecture, and platform- or product-oriented development
• Apply testing strategies, observability, fault tolerance, secure engineering practices, and architectural patterns

Requirements

• Typically 10+ years of repeated success across a variety of projects
• Deep consulting acumen, technical expertise, and product thinking
• Experience building and shipping production-grade platforms, reusable foundations, tools, infrastructure, and workflows
• Experience taking AI and agentic systems from prototype to production
• Strong understanding of infrastructure, authentication, and observability
• Experience delivering high-stakes consulting engagements across multiple language paradigms, stacks, ecosystems, and client industries
• Experience with multiple languages and frameworks, including Java, C#/.NET, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Go, Ruby, Scala, R, and SQL
• Experience experimenting with AI development tools
• Experience building or integrating AI/ML features, including recommendation engines, NLP, computer vision, predictive analytics, RAG pipelines, and agents
• Experience leading modernisation and replatforming efforts
• Experience solving architecture-level problems involving scalability, security, reliability, performance, maintainability, and observability
• Experience facilitating alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Experience mentoring teams and improving team practices
• Strongly preferred: platform engineering, data engineering including Databricks, production agentic systems, RAG pipelines, vector search, LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen, n8n, DevSecOps, DevOps, MLOps, and Infrastructure as Code

Core Competencies

Demonstrates extensive experience in platform engineering, architecture, and AI/ML integration, with a strong focus on delivering high-quality, scalable solutions. Proven ability to lead client engagements, mentor teams, and influence executive decisions while managing complex technical roadmaps.

Highest-signal resume keywords

• Platform Engineering
• AI/ML Feature Integration
• Architecture Design
• Client Engagement Leadership
• Mentoring and Coaching

ATS Optimization Keywords

Hard Skills

• Java
• C#/.NET
• Python
• TypeScript
• JavaScript
• React
• Go
• Ruby
• Scala
• SQL

Soft Skills

• Client Trust Building
• Collaboration
• Communication
• Leadership
• Problem Solving

Industry Keywords

• Consulting Acumen
• Scalability
• Observability
• Security
• Reliability
• Performance
• Maintainability
• High-Stakes Engagements
• Feedback Conversations
• Technical Roadmaps

Tools & Technologies

• Databricks
• DevSecOps
• DevOps
• MLOps
• Infrastructure as Code
• LangChain
• LlamaIndex
• CrewAI
• AutoGen
• N8n