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 organisations to solve meaningful challenges and drive sustainable growth. From early-stage startups to global enterprises, we work across industries to optimise 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 energises you, you’ve found the right place.

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:

• DevSecOps & DevOps
• MLOps
• Infrastructure as Code
• Data Engineering

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.

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
• Framing ambiguous business problems as solvable workflows and systems, earning leadership buy-in, then design and build solutions that balance pragmatism with long-term scalability
• 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
• Collaborating on systems that involve the full ML lifecycle from data ingestion and preprocessing, to model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring
• Delivering and advise 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.
• Driving innovation by proactively surfacing new technical approaches and product solutions
• Leading or initiating formal feedback conversations with teams and clients via retrospectives
• Contributing to the health of your team and 8th Light’s culture by modelling 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 executing 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