Responsibilities
- Lead complex client software engagements and make immediate contributions while building trust with clients.
- Lead architecture and software design discussions and make pragmatic technology decisions.
- Collaborate on systems covering ML data ingestion, preprocessing, model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring.
- Lead teams, maintain a healthy prioritized and estimated backlog, and manage high-level project roadmaps.
- Identify, mitigate, and resolve blockers, risks, and delivery issues while presenting potential solutions to clients.
- Maintain relationships with client technical leaders and provide regular status updates.
- Document outcomes, drive action items, and facilitate feedback conversations through retrospectives.
- Mentor colleagues, lead or design workshops, represent 8th Light in the technology community, and support hiring processes.
- Contribute to team and company culture while balancing technical considerations with product and user needs.
Requirements
- Typically 7+ years of repeated success across a variety of software projects.
- Experience leading high-stakes consulting engagements from discovery to 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 using AI-assistive development tools for scaffolding, refactoring, debugging, test generation, and documentation.
- Experience building or integrating AI/ML-powered features such as recommendation engines, NLP models, computer vision, and predictive analytics.
- Experience with automated testing, debugging and refactoring existing code, Git, macOS/Linux, and CI/CD.
- Experience addressing architecture-level concerns including scalability, security, reliability, and performance.
- Strong collaboration, communication, mentoring, feedback, stakeholder management, and technical decision-making skills.
- Strongly 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.
Benefits
- Hybrid work in the Waterloo office with a minimum of one day per week in the office
- In most cases, consulting engagements do not require travel
- Unlimited access to books, courses, and expert-led training through the O'Reilly learning platform
- Annual financial stipend and time allotment for learning and development
- Coworking support for the global team
- 12 weeks of new parent leave for eligible employees
Tech Stack
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.