Principal Software Engineer

Principal Engineer

Location:

Waterloo, London, England, UK Hybrid (1 day per week in office)

At 8th Light, we bring life to the best ideas.

Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Chicago, we are a technology solutions consultancy that partners with organizations from early‑stage startups to the world’s largest companies. We take on hard software challenges and turn them into durable results. We build agentic products, the platforms they run on, and the engineering and design at every layer.

Our commitment to quality means we deliver solutions we’re 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, you’ve found the right place.

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, Type Script, 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 modernisation 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
• Provided mentorship and team support at scale, while sharing knowledge and improving team practices
• Collaboratively led stakeholders to balance technical considerations with product and user needs
• Actively sought out and effectively given feedback

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…