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 provider that partners with organizations to solve meaningful challenges and drive sustainable growth. From early-stage startups to global enterprises, we work across industries to optimize our clients’ digital products through product strategy innovation, experiential design, AI solutions, and deep engineering expertise.
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:
Demonstrated long-term success on high-stakes consulting engagements across multiple language paradigms, stacks, ecosystems, technical environments, 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: Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Ruby, Scala, R, SQL, and Go
Evaluated and strategically applied AI-assistive development tools to accelerate delivery and improve quality
A track record of understanding, assessing, and embracing new tooling and trends within the software industry
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
Successfully led modernization efforts to align legacy systems with short and long-term business needs
Remedied architecture-level concerns such as scalability, security, reliability, and performance
Facilitated alignment and collaboration across technical and non-technical stakeholders to move initiatives forward in the face of ambiguity and complexity while balancing technical considerations with product and user needs
Provided mentorship and team support at scale, while sharing knowledge and improving team practices
Actively sought out and effectively given feedback
Collaboratively led stakeholders to balance technical considerations with product and user needs
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
Guiding technical direction, solving complex problems, and demonstrating best practices while remaining deeply engaged within the codebase
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
Participating in account planning; opportunity identification.
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:
Delivering and advising on enterprise-grade AI systems, including RAG pipelines, vector search, and agentic frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, Crew AI, AutoGen, n8n), ensuring scalable, production-ready solutions that empower developers and align with business outcomes.
DevSecOps & DevOps
MLOps
Infrastructure as Code
Data Engineering: including platforms like Databricks for data processing and analytics.
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.
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 (Tampa Metro, Ohio, Tennessee, 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!
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