Principal Platform Engineer: AI & Scalable Systems

Jackalope Digital LLC; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 93,000 - 116,000; Full time

Job summary

8th Light in London is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead platform strategy and delivery across diverse client engagements. You’ll mentor teams, shape technical roadmaps, and drive AI-enabled modernization, scalable systems, and trusted engineering practices for clients while fostering our culture of honesty and continuous learning.

This role requires hands-on leadership, deep consulting experience, and the ability to align technical decisions with product outcomes.

Qualifications

• Long-term track record of leading platforms and AI-enabled systems.
• Experience across multiple languages, stacks, and client industries.
• Ability to guide architecture, scalability, security, and observability.

Responsibilities

• Drive platform engineering work at the client level and connect long-term vision to delivery.
• Lead platform strategy and delivery across diverse platform types.
• Advise on architecture, scalability and evolution of client platforms.
• Collaborate on systems covering the full ML lifecycle from data to deployment and monitoring.
• Mentor client engineering teams and influence client CTOs and executives.

Skills

Platform engineering

Data engineering

Agentic systems

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 strategy and delivery across diverse client engagements. You’ll mentor teams, shape technical roadmaps, and drive AI-enabled modernization, scalable systems, and trusted engineering practices for clients while fostering our culture of honesty and continuous learning.

This role requires hands-on leadership, deep consulting experience, and the ability to align technical decisions with product outcomes.