8th Light is looking for a Lead Software Engineer to serve as the lead technologist on consulting projects, working directly with a variety of clients and technologies. You will be responsible for leading high-stakes engagements, making immediate contributions, and driving overall project success.

What You'll Do

Make immediate contributions to projects, rapidly building trust with clients.
Work pragmatically to balance technology choices while delivering high-quality work within deadlines.
Lead architecture and software design discussions.
Collaborate on systems that involve the full ML lifecycle from data ingestion and preprocessing to model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring.
Generate new potential solutions to challenges (technical and non-technical) in partnership with team members and clients.
Lead or initiate formal feedback conversations with teams and clients via retrospectives.
Clearly articulate and document outcomes and drive forward action items.
Contribute to the health of your team and 8th Light’s culture by modeling our values.
Ensure your team has a healthy, prioritized, estimated backlog.
Manage high-level project roadmaps as the team lead for large engagements.
Maintain relationships with client technical leaders.
Hold regular syncs with the client to provide status updates, and for identifying and evaluating risks and presenting potential solutions.
Identify, mitigate, and resolve blockers to team progress.
Contribute to 8th Light by serving as a mentor, leading or designing workshops internally or for clients, representing 8th Light in the tech community, or supporting our hiring processes.

What We're Looking For

7+ years of experience with long-term repeated success on a variety of projects.
Experience successfully leading high-stakes consulting engagements from discovery to production.
Experience building high-quality, maintainable software collaboratively and incrementally.
Written production-quality code in Python, Java, Javascript, and React.
Leveraged AI-assistive development tools for tasks like scaffolding, refactoring, debugging, test generation, and documentation.
Experience building or integrating AI/ML-powered features into products or systems (e.g., recommendation engines, NLP models, computer vision, predictive analytics).
Used context-appropriate automated testing to inform software design choices and catch bugs.
Debugged and refactored pre-existing code to incrementally improve it.
Collaborated with teams using Git, MacOS/Linux, and CI/CD.
Remedied architecture-level concerns such as scalability, security, reliability, and performance.
Brought together people from different functions and perspectives in forums that encourage idea sharing, collaboration, and problem solving.
Made thoughtful recommendations and set direction in the face of ambiguity.
Mentored and shared knowledge with colleagues.
Actively sought out and effectively given feedback.
Communicated empathically with stakeholders and colleagues.
Collaboratively led stakeholders to balance technical considerations with product and user needs.

Nice to Have

MLOps experience, including tools like LangChain for application development and managing the ML lifecycle.
Data Engineering experience, including platforms like Databricks for data processing and analytics.
DevSecOps & DevOps experience.
Infrastructure as Code experience.

Technical Stack

Languages & Frameworks: Python, Java, Javascript, React
Tools & Platforms: Git, MacOS/Linux, CI/CD
AI/ML Tools: LangChain, Databricks

Team & Environment

You will serve as the lead technologist on projects, working directly with a variety of clients.

Benefits & Compensation

Robust L&D program featuring unlimited access to thousands of books, courses, and expert-led training on the O'Reilly learning platform.
Annual financial stipend and time allotment for learning & development.
Coworking support for global team.
Flexible PTO.
Wellness days.
12 weeks of new parent leave available for eligible employees.
Transparent semi-annual promotion panel.
Compensation varies by location: Structure 1 (Tampa Metro, Ohio, Tennessee, Wisconsin): $126,279-$157,849 USD; Structure 2 (Chicago Metro, Miami Metro, Philadelphia Metro, Raleigh Metro): $132,700-$165,875 USD; Structure 3 (Austin Metro, Boston Metro , DC Metro): $141,261-$176,576 USD; Structure 4 (Los Angeles, Seattle, New York City): $147,254-$184,068 USD.