8th Light Principal Data Engineer at 8th Light leads architecture and delivery of scalable software solutions across multiple languages and AI/ML systems. The role involves consulting, product thinking, and technical leadership.
Responsibilities
As a go-to technologist and strategist within 8th Light, you’ll 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. You’ll be responsible for:
Rapidly building trust with clients, demonstrating technical expertise and understanding of their domain and objectives
Driving platform engineering work at the client level, connecting long-term technical vision to what ships
Leading platform strategy and delivery across diverse platform types, connecting long-term vision to what ships
Working pragmatically to balance technology choices while delivering high-quality work within deadlines
Advising clients on architecture, scalability and platform evolution, connecting technical decisions to product and business outcomes
Collaborating on systems that involve the full ML lifecycle from data ingestion and preprocessing, to model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring
Driving innovation by proactively surfacing new technical approaches and product solutions
Leading or initiating formal feedback conversations with teams and clients via retrospectives
Clearly articulating and documenting outcomes and driving forward action items
Contributing to the health of your team and 8th Light’s culture by modeling our Values
Designing and managing high-level technical roadmaps for large engagements
Qualification
Built high-qualityA track record of understanding
Required
You’ve 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 and architect scalable solutions. You bring a blend of deep consulting acumen, technical expertise, and product thinking that drives measurable and impactful outcomes. In your previous experience, you have:
Built and shipped production-grade platforms: the reusable foundations, tools, infrastructure, and workflows that help other teams shift faster and more reliably
Taken AI and agentic systems from prototype to production, with a strong understanding of infrastructure, authentication, and observability
Delivered on high-stakes consulting engagements across multiple language paradigms, stacks, ecosystems, and client industries
Built high-quality, maintainable software collaboratively, incrementally, and through an approach tailored towards the unique needs of the clients you’ve served
Led the development and delivery of production-grade software using a variety of languages and frameworks, including but not limited to: Java, C#/.NET, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Go, Ruby, Scala, R, and SQL
Actively experimented with AI development tools and translated that experimentation into faster, higher-quality delivery for your teams
A track record of understanding, assessing, and embracing new tooling and trends within the software industry
Built or integrated AI/ML features into products and systems, including recommendation engines, NLP, computer vision, predictive analytics, RAG pipelines, and agents
Successfully led modernization and replatforming efforts to align legacy systems with short and long-term business needs
Led and delivered solutions to architecture-level problems including scalability, security, reliability, performance, maintainability, and observability
Facilitated alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders to move initiatives forward through ambiguity and complexity
