Principal Platform & AI Engineer (Hybrid UK)

8th Light; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 93,000 - 116,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Wellness program

Learning & development stipend

New parent leave

Coworking support

Job summary

8th Light in London is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead platform and product-scale initiatives across client engagements, typically one to two projects per year. You’ll shape architectural strategy, drive platform engineering, and mentor teams.

The role emphasizes diverse tech stacks (Java, C#, Python, TypeScript, Go, etc.), AI/ML integration, and modernisation efforts, with a hybrid London-based setup including a weekly in-office day at our Waterloo hub.

Qualifications

• 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

Responsibilities

• 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

Skills

Platform engineering

Data engineering

RAG pipelines

Vector search

LangChain

DevSecOps

MLOps

Infrastructure as Code

Tools

Databricks

LangChain

LlamaIndex

CrewAI

AutoGen

n8n

Job description

8th Light in London is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead platform and product-scale initiatives across client engagements, typically one to two projects per year. You’ll shape architectural strategy, drive platform engineering, and mentor teams.

The role emphasizes diverse tech stacks (Java, C#, Python, TypeScript, Go, etc.), AI/ML integration, and modernisation efforts, with a hybrid London-based setup including a weekly in-office day at our Waterloo hub.