Principal Software Engineer

Northern Light provides the world's most sophisticated machine learning-powered competitive intelligence platform for market research. For over 25 years, we've been helping Fortune 1000 enterprises make smarter, faster, and more informed decisions through our award-winning Single Point knowledge management platform. Our clients include global leaders across technology, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and life sciences who depend on us to transform fragmented data into strategic clarity.

We're a company that takes pride in our compulsive drive to provide exceptional client support. We wake up each day ready to tackle the challenges of knowledge management and we never stand still. Our recent innovations include generative AI capabilities, machine learning insights, and advanced competitive intelligence automation.

Single Point is an enterprise search and market-intelligence platform. We license content from a large number of publishers and research vendors, combine it with each customer's own internal documents, normalize all of it, enrich it, index it into per-customer search databases, and serve it through a customer-specific portal with search, analytics, NLP enrichment, and AI summarization and Q&A.

Our customers are research and strategy teams at large enterprises. When they can't find something, it costs them a decision.

Northern Light is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to start in our content pipeline and grow into ownership across the full platform. The pipeline brings in content from well over a hundred vendor feeds, makes it consistent, and makes it searchable for every customer. From there, the whole platform is open to you: services, search, AI features, and the customer portals.

It all works, it earns real revenue, and it's ready for its next chapter. We're looking for someone who sees a 25-year-old platform as an opportunity, reaches for AI tools by default, and gets genuinely excited about making something proven dramatically better.

• Build and maintain ingestion for new vendor feeds and new customers, from the vendor's delivery quirks through to documents appearing in a customer's search results.
• Shape how vendor content is transformed into a consistent, reliable format customers can trust.
• Migrate legacy pipelines onto the current stack, including an ongoing Perl-to-Python effort and a newer move toward containerized, contract-bound services.
• Help replace convention-driven job scheduling with explicit, durable workflows.
• Track down production content problems and fix them at the root.
• Bring AI into the pipeline itself, using ML, NLP, LLMs, and AI tooling to classify, enrich, and validate content, and to speed up how we build and migrate.
• Work across the full stack, from back-end services to the customer portals (PHP and React/Type Script), following problems and ideas all the way from the vendor to what the customer sees.

You can take a task that isn't fully specified, go find the missing context yourself, and drive it until it is running in production, verified against the behavior it replaced, and the thing it replaced is switched off. Not “my part is done.” Done.

Transforming a mature system takes creativity and energy as much as rigor. We want someone who brings fresh ideas, shares them freely, and makes the people around them better.

• A track record of delivering production software. Things you built that real users depend on, and that you kept running.
• Comfort in code you didn't write. Much of this estate is older than the people working on it. You can read an unfamiliar system, form an…