Principal Software Engineer (Hybrid)

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Principal Software Engineer (Hybrid) in UK

8th Light
Full time
Email

UK
08/27/2026
Report

London

Responsibilities

Lead platform engineering strategy and delivery, connecting long-term technical vision to shipped outcomes.
Advise clients on architecture, scalability, platform evolution, modernization, and technical tradeoffs.
Design and manage high-level technical roadmaps for large engagements.
Collaborate on systems spanning the ML lifecycle from data ingestion and preprocessing through deployment, integration, and monitoring.
Lead production software delivery across varied languages, frameworks, stacks, ecosystems, and client industries.
Build trust with clients, influence CTO and executive decisions, and align technical work with product and business outcomes.
Coach client engineering teams, transfer knowledge, mentor colleagues, and improve engineering practices.
Facilitate retrospectives, strategy sessions, technical deep-dives, feedback conversations, and stakeholder alignment.
Partner with account teams on planning, opportunity identification, stakeholder relationships, and pre-sales scope shaping.
Apply scalable system design, modular architecture, testing strategies, observability, fault tolerance, and secure engineering practices.

Requirements

Typically 10+ years of repeated success across a variety of software projects.
Deep consulting acumen, technical expertise, product thinking, and experience guiding ambiguous initiatives.
Experience building and shipping production-grade platforms, reusable software foundations, infrastructure, tools, and workflows.
Experience taking AI and agentic systems from prototype to production, including infrastructure, authentication, and observability.
Experience leading software development and delivery with languages and frameworks such as Java, C#/.NET, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Go, Ruby, Scala, R, and SQL.
Experience building or integrating AI/ML features such as recommendation engines, NLP, computer vision, predictive analytics, RAG pipelines, and agents.
Experience with modernization and replatforming efforts and with architecture-level scalability, security, reliability, performance, maintainability, and observability challenges.
Preferred experience in platform engineering, data engineering, Databricks, production agentic systems, RAG pipelines, vector search, LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen, n8n, DevSecOps, DevOps, MLOps, and Infrastructure as Code.
Strong stakeholder communication, technical leadership, mentoring, facilitation, and knowledge-sharing abilities.

Benefits

Hybrid work with a minimum of one day per week in the Waterloo office.
Unlimited access to books, courses, and expert-led training through the O'Reilly learning platform.
Annual financial stipend and dedicated time for learning and development.
Coworking support for the global team.
12 weeks of new parent leave for eligible employees.
Most consulting engagements generally do not require travel.

8th Light

We ship AI. 8th Light provides product strategy, design, and engineering for the work that earns its way to production. Agentic products, deep platform expertise. Since 2006, 8th Light has helped ambitious organizations find the right thing to build, and then build it. Through this important work...

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