Responsibilities
- Lead complex software consulting engagements from discovery through production and build trust with clients.
- Lead architecture and software design discussions and make pragmatic technology decisions.
- Collaborate on systems covering the full ML lifecycle, including data ingestion, preprocessing, model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring.
- Lead teams, maintain a healthy prioritized backlog, manage high-level project roadmaps, and resolve blockers.
- Maintain relationships with client technical leaders, provide status updates, identify risks, and present solutions.
- Facilitate feedback conversations, document outcomes, and drive action items forward.
- Mentor colleagues, lead or design workshops, represent 8th Light in the technology community, and support hiring processes.
Requirements
- Typically 7+ years of repeated success across a variety of software projects.
- Experience leading high-stakes consulting engagements from discovery through production.
- Production-quality coding experience with a variety of languages and frameworks, including Java, C#/.NET, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Go, Ruby, Scala, R, and SQL.
- Experience building or integrating AI/ML-powered features such as recommendation engines, NLP models, computer vision, or predictive analytics.
- Experience with automated testing, debugging, refactoring, Git, macOS/Linux, and CI/CD.
- Ability to address architecture-level concerns including scalability, security, reliability, and performance.
- Ability to lead technical direction, collaborate with stakeholders, balance technical and product needs, communicate empathetically, and mentor colleagues.
- Strongly preferred experience in platform engineering, data engineering with Databricks, production agentic systems, DevSecOps, DevOps, MLOps, or infrastructure as code.
Benefits
- 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.
- Hybrid London arrangement requiring a minimum of one day per week in the Waterloo office; consulting engagements generally do not require travel.
Tech Stack
Categories
About 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, we bring life to the best ideas. The hype is loud. The potential is great. The work is what matters. Most teams can build a working agent. Operating one is the harder problem. Demos that impress, deploys that stall, infrastructure that exposes fragility under real traffic. That second problem is where we live. How we partner with technology leaders: -> Validated Innovation. AI makes it cheap to build. It doesn't make it cheap to be wrong. Rapid discovery, real users, and only what earns the investment. -> AI-Ready Platforms. Agents need foundations that hold. We modernize stacks into modular, observable, API-first systems your business can trust. -> Governed Autonomy. Agents that act. Guardrails that let you sleep. Your production workflow ships in 8 weeks, governed and integrated with your real systems. -> Marketplace at Speed. Scale without breaking. Handle the volume, block the bad actors, convert customers better. Over twenty years working alongside engineering teams in financial services, education, retail, real estate, healthcare, and consumer. Custom software development. AI engineering. Chicago (HQ). London. Los Angeles. New York. Austin. If you're figuring out what to build next, or how to operate what you already shipped, let's talk.