---
title: 'Principal Software Engineer (Remote) at 8th Light'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/principal-software-engineer-remote-8th-light-united-states-p9x0y23q4mg2'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-08-27'
---

# Principal Software Engineer (Remote) at 8th Light

- **Company:** 8th Light
- **Location:** United States
- **Posted:** 2026-08-26
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-08-27
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/8thlightrebuild/jobs/7978661003

## Job description

## Who We Are

At 8th Light, we bring life to the best ideas.

Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Chicago, we are a technology solutions consultancy that partners with organizations from early-stage startups to the world's largest companies. We take on hard software challenges and turn them into durable results. We build agentic products, the platforms they run on, and the engineering and design at every layer.

Our commitment to quality means we deliver solutions we’re truly proud of, while our curiosity sparks innovation and breakthrough thinking. 8th Lights thrive in an environment that champions continuous education, fueling our growth through mentorship and hands-on work. We foster an open, collaborative culture grounded in honesty that builds trust, and believe true success is measured by the outcomes we create for our clients.

If this kind of work and our kind of people energizes you, you’ve found the right place.

## Who You Are

You’ve shown long-term repeated success on a variety of projects, typically over the course of 10+ years. You are a trusted expert and leader, often called upon to guide ambiguous initiatives and architect scalable solutions. You bring a blend of deep consulting acumen, technical expertise, and product thinking that drives measurable and impactful outcomes. In your previous experience, you have:

- Built and shipped production-grade platforms: the reusable foundations, tools, infrastructure, and workflows that help other teams shift faster and more reliably
- Taken AI and agentic systems from prototype to production, with a strong understanding of infrastructure, authentication, and observability
- Delivered on  high-stakes consulting engagements across multiple language paradigms, stacks, ecosystems, and client industries
- Built high-quality, maintainable software collaboratively, incrementally, and through an approach tailored towards the unique needs of the clients you’ve served
- Led the development and delivery of production-grade software using a variety of languages and frameworks, including but not limited to: Java, C#/.NET, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Go, Ruby, Scala, R, and SQL
- Actively experimented with AI development tools and translated that experimentation into faster, higher-quality delivery for your teams
- A track record of understanding, assessing, and embracing new tooling and trends within the software industry
- Built or integrated AI/ML features into products and systems, including recommendation engines, NLP, computer vision, predictive analytics, RAG pipelines, and agents
- Successfully led modernization and replatforming efforts to align legacy systems with short and long-term business needs
- Led and delivered solutions to architecture-level problems including scalability, security, reliability, performance, maintainability, and observability
- Facilitated alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders to move initiatives forward through ambiguity and complexity
- Provided mentorship and team support at scale, while sharing knowledge and improving team practices
- Collaboratively led stakeholders to balance technical considerations with product and user needs
- Actively sought out and effectively given feedback

## What You’ll Do At 8th Light

As a go-to technologist and strategist within 8th Light, you’ll work with a variety of clients, typically one to two in a year, while continuing to deepen your and our collective domain expertise over the course of your career with us. You’ll be responsible for:

- Rapidly building trust with clients, demonstrating technical expertise and understanding of their domain and objectives
- Driving platform engineering work at the client level, connecting long-term technical vision to what ships
- Leading platform strategy and delivery across diverse platform types, connecting long-term vision to what ships
- Working pragmatically to balance technology choices while delivering high-quality work within deadlines
- Advising clients on architecture, scalability and platform evolution, connecting technical decisions to product and business outcomes
- Collaborating on systems that involve the full ML lifecycle from data ingestion and preprocessing, to model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring
- Driving innovation by proactively surfacing new technical approaches and product solutions
- Leading or initiating formal feedback conversations with teams and clients via retrospectives
- Clearly articulating and documenting outcomes and driving forward action items
- Contributing to the health of your team and 8th Light’s culture by modeling our Values
- Designing and managing high-level technical roadmaps for large engagements
- Building your network and maintaining relationships with clients and other industry leaders within your domain
- Coaching client engineering teams, transferring knowledge and leveling up practices
- Influencing client CTOs and executive decisions. Planning and execute technical work that involves stakeholders outside of project boundaries such as across a client's technical organization
- Partner with account teams on planning, opportunity identification, stakeholder relationships, and pre-sales scope shaping
- Facilitating retrospectives, strategy sessions, and technical deep-dives to improve team and project outcomes
- Identifying, mitigating, and resolving blockers to team progress
- Contributing 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
- Demonstrating leadership in scalable system design, modular architecture, and platform- or product-oriented development
- Bringing depth in testing strategies, observability, fault tolerance, and secure engineering practices
- Applying architectural patterns to evaluate tradeoffs and drive clear, documented design rationale

Strongly Preferred Skills

We work across many areas, and encourage anyone with the experience listed above to apply. We would particularly like to encourage applicants with experience in the following areas:

- Platform engineering: building reusable software foundations, internal developer platforms, and infrastructure that other teams build on
- Data Engineering: including platforms like Databricks for data processing and analytics
- Delivering production agentic systems, including RAG pipelines, vector search, and agentic frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen, and n8n
- DevSecOps & DevOps
- MLOps
- Infrastructure as Code

Building a truly diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace is an ongoing journey, and we’re excited to keep learning and growing together. We have a proud tradition of hiring talented colleagues with real-world career experiences.

## How You’ll be Supported

At 8th Light, we believe our people are our greatest asset. Their growth, well-being, and success shape our future.

Our wellness package is designed with the Whole YOU in mind and includes:

- A 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 our global team
- Flexible PTO
- 12 weeks of new parent leave available for eligible employees

See our full list of [Benefits](http://8thlight.com/benefits).

A Note on Compensation

At 8th Light, we are committed to a compensation philosophy that is transparent, fair, and helps us attract and retain top talent in alignment with our company’s strategic growth goals and clients’ needs.

We benchmark our salaries using Geographic Structures to establish competitive pay ranges within the regions where 8th Lights live. Our pay ranges for our Principal Engineer position within our four US structures are as follows:

- Structure 1 (Denver, Tampa Metro, Philadelphia Metro, Ohio, Wisconsin)
- RANGE: $151,535-$189,418 USD
- Structure 2 (Chicago Metro, Miami Metro, Philadelphia Metro, Raleigh Metro )
- RANGE: $159,240-$199,050 USD
- Structure 3 (Austin Metro, Boston Metro , DC Metro)
- RANGE: $169,513-$211,892 USD
- Structure 4 (Los Angeles, Seattle, New York City)
- RANGE: $176,705- $220,881 USD

Reach out to recruiting@8thlight.com for more relevant information pertaining to your local market.

8th Light Hubs and Geographies

As a remote-first company, 8th Light's culture is rooted in strong connections that extend across our teams, regions, and beyond client work. We are a distributed team across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, with hubs in Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle.

If you are hired into a hub, you will be a part of a team with regular rituals around co-working and community building. For team members outside of those cities, we offer access to coworking spaces to foster continued collaboration and connection across our global team.

In most cases, our consulting engagements do not require travel.

We hope to see you apply!

#LI-Remote A Note on Your Privacy

At 8th Light, one of our core values is Honesty that builds trust — and that shapes how we approach hiring. We want you to have a clear picture of who we are, what we're looking for, and how we handle your information throughout the process.

Before submitting your application, please take a moment to review our [Global Candidate Privacy Notice](https://8thlight.com/global-8th-light-candidate-privacy-notice). By applying, you acknowledge that you've read it.

## About 8th Light

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: 8th Light is an employee-owned, remote-first custom software development consultancy that helps organizations build, scale, and optimize digital products, with a growing focus on agentic AI systems.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Privately Held, Employee-Owned)
- **Headquarters**: Chicago, Illinois, United States
- **Founded**: 2006
- **Founders**: Not publicly listed (company is employee-owned)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Custom Software Development, AI Engineering, Product Strategy & Design, Technology Consulting
- **Target customers**: B2B, Enterprise, Mid-Market, and Growth-Stage Companies across financial services, education, retail, real estate, healthcare, and consumer sectors
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "Unlock human potential through technology" — helping organizations "push boundaries, drive transformation, and create lasting impact through technology" [8thlight.com](https://8thlight.com/about)

## Products & Services
- **Custom Software Development & AI Engineering**: Full-stack development, platform modernization, and agentic AI system design. The company focuses on building "modular, observable, API-first" systems that can support AI agents in production.
- **Product Strategy & Design**: Blending product strategy innovation, experiential design, and deep engineering expertise to help businesses build, scale, and optimize digital products.
- **Agentic AI Studio**: A structured program to ship one production-grade AI workflow in 8–12 weeks, with built-in boundaries, observability, and evaluation. Focus areas include "AI-Ready Platforms," "Governed Autonomy," and "Validated Innovation."
- **Marketplace at Speed**: Specialized platform engineering for marketplaces, designed to handle high volume, block bad actors, and convert customers better — including agentic traffic detection.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (privately held, employee-owned)
- **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue of approximately **$29.0M** (LinkedIn estimate) [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/8th-light)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Employee-owned; notable clients include Pfizer, GeneDx, Cars.com, Fidelity Life Association, Grubhub, and AXUS Travel [8thlight.com](https://8thlight.com/about)
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Active pivot into Agentic AI with a dedicated "Agentic AI Studio" and a Technical Director of AI (Travis Frisinger) [8thlight.com](https://8thlight.com/)
  - 4 active job postings as of mid-2025, with a +33.3% monthly increase in postings [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/8th-light)
  - Employee count of ~112 (down ~4.9% YoY), suggesting a period of strategic refocusing rather than rapid scaling [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/8th-light)
  - Presence in 4 countries (US, UK, Canada, Spain) with offices in Chicago (HQ), London, Los Angeles, New York, and Austin

## Competitive Advantages
- **Employee-Owned Structure**: As an employee-owned company, decision-making and profit-sharing are aligned with the team, fostering a culture of ownership and long-term thinking.
- **Deep Technical Craftsmanship**: Known for a "craftsmanship" culture with expertise across 40+ programming languages and a strong emphasis on quality, observability, and production-grade systems.
- **Agentic AI Specialization**: Early mover in the agentic AI space with a dedicated "Agentic AI Studio" and a Technical Director of AI, offering a structured 8–12 week "Governed Autonomy" program to ship production AI workflows.
- **Regulated Industry Experience**: 20 years of experience building in regulated, high-stakes environments (financial services, healthcare, insurance), giving them a unique ability to handle compliance and security at scale.
- **Employee-Owned Model**: Aligns incentives, fosters long-term thinking, and creates a culture of shared success.

## Strategic Focus
- **Agentic AI as Core Growth Vector**: The company is heavily investing in agentic AI, positioning itself as a partner for enterprises that need to move from AI proof-of-concept to production-grade, governed AI systems.
- **Platform Modernization**: Focus on modernizing legacy stacks into "modular, observable, API-first" systems that can support AI agents and high-volume marketplace traffic.
- **Validated Innovation**: Emphasizing rapid discovery and user validation to ensure AI investments are directed toward features that users will actually use and that earn their keep in production.
- **Marketplace at Speed**: Building platforms that can absorb real volume, separate signal from noise, and handle agentic traffic (both legitimate buyers and bad actors).

## Why Work Here
- **Remote-First Culture**: "Our remote-first culture provides you the freedom to work from wherever you thrive best" — with flexible work schedules and coworking options available [8thlight.com](https://8thlight.com/careers)
- **Employee Ownership**: The company is employee-owned, meaning team members have a direct stake in the company's success and long-term direction.
- **Strong Learning Culture**: "Continuous Education That Fuels Individual and Company Growth" — includes an annual professional development stipend, dedicated learning time, access to the O'Reilly Learning Platform, and exposure to 40+ programming languages and cutting-edge AI/ML tools (Cursor, Copilot, Claude, Gemini, Tuple, Figma, etc.) [8thlight.com](https://8thlight.com/benefits/us-benefits)
- **Comprehensive Benefits**: 20 days PTO + 11 holidays, competitive medical/vision/dental (including fertility and gender-affirming care), 12 weeks paid parental leave, 401(k) with 4% match, mental health resources, and a "Beacon Award" quarterly bonus program (up to $2,500) [8thlight.com](https://8thlight.com/benefits/us-benefits)
- **Remote-First with Global Presence**: Remote-first culture with hubs in Chicago (HQ), London, Los Angeles, New York, and Austin. Employees are distributed across the US, UK, Canada, and Spain.
- **Engineering Culture**: Emphasis on craftsmanship, continuous learning, and working across 40+ programming languages. The company provides access to tools like Cursor, Copilot, Claude, Gemini, Tuple, and Figma.
- **Employee Sentiment**: Glassdoor-style rating of 3.2/5.0 (52 reviews), with Work-Life Balance rated highest at 3.7/5.0 and Compensation rated lowest at 3.0/5.0 [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/8th-light)

## Sources
1. [8thlight.com - About](https://8thlight.com/about)
2. [8thlight.com - Careers](https://8thlight.com/careers)
3. [8thlight.com - Homepage](https://8thlight.com/)
4. [8thlight.com - US Benefits](https://8thlight.com/benefits/us-benefits)
5. [LinkedIn - 8th Light](https://www.linkedin.com/company/8th-light)

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