Responsibilities
- Build trust with clients by demonstrating technical expertise and understanding their domains and objectives
- Drive platform engineering strategy and delivery, connecting long-term technical vision to shipped outcomes
- Advise clients on architecture, scalability, platform evolution, and technology tradeoffs
- Collaborate on systems spanning data ingestion, preprocessing, model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring
- Design and manage high-level technical roadmaps for large engagements
- Influence client CTOs and executive decisions and lead work involving stakeholders across client technical organizations
- Coach client engineering teams, transfer knowledge, and improve engineering practices
- Partner with account teams on planning, opportunity identification, stakeholder relationships, and pre-sales scope shaping
- Facilitate retrospectives, strategy sessions, technical deep-dives, workshops, and feedback conversations
- Identify, mitigate, and resolve blockers to team progress
- Lead scalable system design, modular architecture, platform-oriented development, and product-oriented development
- Apply testing strategies, observability, fault tolerance, secure engineering practices, and architectural patterns
- Document outcomes and design rationale while driving action items forward
- Contribute to company culture, mentorship, hiring support, and representation in the technology community
Requirements
- Typically 10+ years of repeated success across a variety of software projects and consulting engagements
- 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 production software delivery across multiple languages, frameworks, stacks, ecosystems, and industries
- Experience building or integrating AI/ML capabilities such as recommendation engines, NLP, computer vision, predictive analytics, RAG pipelines, and agents
- Experience leading modernization and replatforming efforts for legacy systems
- Expertise solving architecture-level problems involving scalability, security, reliability, performance, maintainability, and observability
- Experience facilitating alignment among technical and non-technical stakeholders and advising product and business decisions
- Experience mentoring and supporting teams at scale and improving engineering practices
- Strongly preferred experience in platform engineering, data engineering, production agentic systems, DevSecOps, DevOps, MLOps, and Infrastructure as Code
- Preferred familiarity with Databricks, RAG pipelines, vector search, and agentic frameworks including LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen, and n8n
Benefits
- Hybrid work in the London hub 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 time allotment for learning and development
- Coworking support for the global team
- 12 weeks of new parent leave for eligible employees
- Consulting engagements generally do not require travel
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.