Principal Engineer (Software/Data/Database)

Waterloo, London, England, UK | Hybrid (1 day per week in office)

Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Chicago, we are a technology solutions consultancy that partners with organisations 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. You’ve shown long-term repeated success on a variety of projects, typically over the course of 10+ years.

• 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 modernisation 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.
• 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.
• Collaborating on systems that involve the full ML lifecycle from data ingestion and preprocessing, to model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring.
• 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.
• Planning and executing 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.
• 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.
• Bringing depth in testing strategies, observability, fault tolerance, and secure engineering practices.
• 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.
• DevSecOps & DevOps.

Building a truly diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace is an ongoing journey, and we’re excited to keep learning and growing together. At 8th Light, we believe our people are our greatest asset. A robust L&D programme 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. ~ 12 weeks of new parent leave available for eligible employees.

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 London is: £92,818-£116,122 GBP.

8th Light Hubs and Geographies: 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. Employees working from our London hub follow a hybrid model, which includes a minimum of one day per week in our Waterloo Office. This co-working day is designed to encourage collaboration and further strengthen our community. In most cases, our consulting engagements do not require travel.