1 day ago
London, United KingdomStaff+
Responsibilities
- Build and lead platform engineering initiatives, reusable software foundations, internal developer platforms, and infrastructure for client teams.
- Advise clients on architecture, scalability, platform evolution, modernization, reliability, performance, security, observability, and maintainability.
- Lead delivery of production-grade software and AI/agentic systems, including work across data ingestion, preprocessing, model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring.
- Design high-level technical roadmaps, evaluate architectural tradeoffs, document decisions, and connect long-term technical vision to shipped outcomes.
- Build trust with clients, influence CTOs and executives, facilitate technical deep-dives and strategy sessions, and align technical, product, and business stakeholders.
- Coach client engineering teams, mentor colleagues, lead workshops, improve engineering practices, and contribute to hiring and the broader technology community.
- Partner with account teams on planning, opportunity identification, stakeholder relationships, and pre-sales scope shaping.
- Identify, mitigate, and resolve blockers while leading feedback conversations, retrospectives, and action planning.
Requirements
- Typically 10+ years of experience with repeated success across a variety of software projects and consulting engagements.
- Demonstrated expertise building and shipping production-grade platforms, tools, infrastructure, workflows, and maintainable software.
- Experience taking AI and agentic systems from prototype to production, including infrastructure, authentication, and observability.
- Experience leading software delivery across multiple languages, frameworks, stacks, ecosystems, and client industries.
- Experience building or integrating AI/ML features such as recommendation engines, NLP, computer vision, predictive analytics, RAG pipelines, and agents.
- Experience leading modernization, replatforming, scalability, security, reliability, performance, maintainability, and observability initiatives.
- Strong client consulting, architecture, product thinking, stakeholder communication, leadership, mentoring, and ambiguity-management skills.
- Preferred experience includes platform engineering, data engineering with Databricks, production agentic systems with RAG and vector search, LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen, or n8n, plus DevSecOps, DevOps, MLOps, and infrastructure as code.
Benefits
- Hybrid work in the London Waterloo office with a minimum of one day per week in person.
- 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 do not require travel.
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.