9 hours ago
London, United KingdomStaff+
Responsibilities
- Drive platform engineering strategy and delivery across client engagements.
- Design scalable, modular, maintainable systems and provide architecture guidance on scalability, security, reliability, performance, and observability.
- Collaborate on ML lifecycle systems spanning data ingestion, preprocessing, model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring.
- Advise clients and executives on architecture, platform evolution, technical roadmaps, and product or business outcomes.
- Build trust with clients, lead technical deep-dives and strategy sessions, and communicate documented decisions and action items.
- Coach client engineering teams, transfer knowledge, mentor colleagues, and improve engineering practices.
- Lead modernisation, replatforming, and production delivery efforts across varied languages, frameworks, stacks, and industries.
- Partner with account teams on opportunity identification, stakeholder relationships, pre-sales scope shaping, and planning.
- Facilitate retrospectives, feedback conversations, workshops, and initiatives that improve team and project outcomes.
- Identify and resolve blockers while balancing technical tradeoffs and delivery deadlines.
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 software delivery with Java, C#/.NET, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Go, Ruby, Scala, R, and SQL, or comparable technologies.
- Experience building or integrating AI/ML features such as recommendation engines, NLP, computer vision, predictive analytics, RAG pipelines, and agents.
- Experience with modernisation, replatforming, architecture-level problem solving, and scalable system design.
- Demonstrated ability to lead ambiguous initiatives, influence technical and non-technical stakeholders, and advise CTOs or executives.
- Experience mentoring and coaching engineering teams, facilitating alignment, and improving team practices.
- Strong understanding of testing strategies, observability, fault tolerance, secure engineering practices, and architectural tradeoffs.
- Preferred experience with platform engineering, internal developer platforms, Databricks, production agentic systems, vector search, LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen, n8n, DevSecOps, DevOps, MLOps, and Infrastructure as Code.
Benefits
- Hybrid London arrangement requiring at least one day per week in the Waterloo office; consulting engagements generally do not require travel.
- 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.
- Opportunity to work with varied clients, mentor teams, lead workshops, and contribute to a collaborative learning culture.
Tech Stack
Categories
About 8th Light
8th Light is an employee-owned software consultancy that provides product strategy, design, and engineering, with a focus on AI-enabled systems and platform modernization. It partners with enterprises in finance, education, retail, real estate, healthcare, and consumer markets through project-based engagements and embedded teams. Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Chicago, it is privately held with additional offices in London, Los Angeles, New York, and Austin.