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! #LI-Remote

Senior Software Engineer - [Chicago Only] 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 and 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 repeated success on a variety of projects, typically over the course of 4+ years. You have a broad range of expertise that allows you to make an immediate impact on projects. In your previous experience, you have: - Successfully contributed to high-stakes consulting engagements from discovery to production - Written production-quality code using a variety of languages and frameworks, that include: Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Ruby, Scala, R, SQL, and Go - Built high-quality, maintainable software collaboratively, incrementally, and through an approach tailored towards the unique needs of the clients you’ve served - Leveraged AI-assistive development tools for tasks like scaffolding, refactoring, debugging, test generation, and documentation, where appropriate - 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 - Debugged and refactored pre-existing code to incrementally improve it - Collaborated with teams using Git, MacOS/Linux, and CI/CD - Remedied architecture-level concerns such as scalability, security, reliability, and performance - Contributed to forums that encourage idea sharing, collaboration, and problem solving - Made thoughtful recommendations and set direction in the face of ambiguity - Mentored and shared knowledge with colleagues - Actively sought out and effectively given feedback - Communicated empathically with stakeholders and colleagues - Influenced stakeholders to balance technical considerations with product and user needs What You’ll Do At 8th Light As a senior technologist on projects, you’ll work with a variety of clients, typically one to two in a year, through a variety of technologies and frameworks over the course of your career with us. You’ll work with colleagues who share your passion for technology solutions. You’ll invest time developing your skills and sharing what you know. You’ll be responsible for: - Making immediate contributions to projects, rapidly building trust with your clients and team - Working pragmatically to balance technology choices while delivering high-quality work within deadlines - Contributing to architecture and software design discussions - Collaborating on systems that involve the full ML lifecycle from data ingestion and preprocessing, to model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring - Generating new potential solutions to challenges (technical and non-technical) in partnership with team members and clients - Contributing to formal feedback conversations with teams and clients via retrospectives - Clearly articulating and documenting outcomes and driving forward action items - Regular syncs with your delivery team to provide status updates, and for identifying and evaluating risks and presenting potential solutions - Identifying, mitigating, and resolving blockers to team progress - Pursuing opportunities to further your skills to grow your career and keep pace with the rapid changes within the technology industry - Contributing to your team culture by building connections with your fellow 8th Lights, showing up on camera, and leveraging collaboration opportunities, such as coworking spaces and local team gatherings, where appropriate - Confidently predicting the next World Series Win for the Chicago White Sox. 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: - MLOps: including tools like LangChain for application development and managing the ML lifecycle - Data Engineering: including platforms like Databricks for data processing and analytics - DevSecOps & DevOps - Infrastructure as Code 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 - Coworking support for our global team - Flexible PTO - 12 weeks of new parent leave available for eligible employees - Transparent semi-annual promotion panel 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 Senior Engineer position within Chicago, Illinois is: - $104,160-$130,200 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! #LI-Remote

About Nava Nava is a consultancy and public benefit corporation working to make government services simple and effective. Since 2015, federal, state, and local agencies have trusted Nava to help solve highly scrutinized technology modernization challenges. As a client services company, we guide agencies constrained by legacy systems to a future with sharp user experiences built on secure, reliable, fault-tolerant cloud infrastructure. We bill for our time, offering our expertise and problem-solving approach to help our government partners enhance their digital products and services. People are at the heart of our work, from members of the public who rely on benefit programs to government agency staff. Through human-centered design and modern engineering best practices, we help our government partners understand user needs and deliver on their missions more effectively. This focus gives everyone at Nava the opportunity to do work that is meaningful, impactful, and deeply connected to public good. Position summary You will work on small teams to build scalable applications for our government—designing, implementing, and delivering services that millions of Americans depend on. You care deeply about working on technology that improves people’s lives, but don’t think technology is always the answer. You are passionate about building large-scale systems that are inclusive, well-designed, fast, scalable, and secure, and you'll help set high standards for our teams in terms of simplicity, empathy, and accessibility. The full stack engineer in this role will be focused on Ruby on Rails and developing end to end systems for one of Nava's major government partners. The objective is to modernize an existing legacy enterprise platform to improve its public facing processes, and experiences which will enable users to have more access to the programs and services that they need, in real-time, in a more user friendly and uncomplicated way. This individual will be involved in everything, from strategy, and planning through to post production testing, and support. What you'll do - Working with fellow Nava engineers to design, review, and build well-crafted software. - Collaborate with government partners and other contractors to architect, implement, and deploy new systems and improvements to existing systems. - Working in an agile manner to efficiently ship new features that meet user needs. - Creating tools and processes to automate our development, testing, and production workflows. - Writing and reviewing technical documentation, performing code reviews. - Participating in an on-call rotation to support production systems and investigate issues when they occur. - Taking part in hiring activities (e.g., submitting referrals, conducting interviews, and attending interview debriefs), as needed. Required skills - Ruby, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript - At least 4 years of experience of full-stack engineering contributing development initiatives, in a fast paced, dynamic environment in a self directed manner, that required minimal supervision. - Meaningful experience working on web-based systems, both front-end and back-end - Experience working on large-scale applications and systems - An adaptive, empathetic, collaborative and positive mindset - Ability to think holistically around engineering issues - Knowledge of engineering fundamentals and architecture - Expertise developing well-crafted software - Excellent written and verbal communication skills, technical and otherwise - Experience with modern web development frameworks - Experience designing and implementing application architectures and code that is highly scalable, available, and performant - Self-directed, requiring minimal supervision - Ability to work with others on a team - Previous experience as a software engineer - Aptitude for giving and receiving feedback - Experience with testing, specifically automated testing - Knowing code quality tools such as Linter - Experience with system design such as designing systems that will be sustainable with high usage, designing a front end and back end that talk to each other Please note: the level of the role will be determined by Nava leadership based on experience and skillset. Compensation $120,600—$135,900 USD Other requirements All roles at Nava require the following: Legal authorization to work in the United States Ability to meet any other requirements for government contracts for which candidates are hired Work authorization that doesn’t require visa sponsorship, now or in the future May be subject to a government background check or security clearance, depending on the contract Perks working with Nava Health coverage — comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans to support your overall health needs Insurance coverage — Nava provides disability, life, and accidental death insurance at no cost Time off — vacation, holidays (including Juneteenth), and floating holidays to rest and recharge Company holidays — enjoy 12 paid federal holidays each year on top of your regular PTO Annual bonus — when Nava meets its goals, eligible employees receive a performance-based annual bonus Parental leave — paid time off for new parents, plus weekly meals delivered to your home Wellness program — full platform offering physical, mental, & emotional health resources & support tools Virtual care — see doctors online with no copay through UnitedHealthcare’s virtual visit program Sabbatical leave — earn extended unpaid leave after continuous service for personal growth or rest 401(k) match — Nava matches 4% of your salary to support your retirement savings plan Flexible work — remote-first environment with flexibility built around your schedule and responsibilities Home office setup — company laptop & setup assistance provided via Staples for remote work needs Utility support — monthly reimbursement to help offset eligible home office utility expenses Learning opportunities — internal training programs and resources to help grow your professional skills Development opportunities — LinkedIn Learning access & an annual allowance for courses, tuition, & certs Referral bonus — get rewarded when you refer great people who join the Nava team Commuter benefits — pre-tax commuter programs to support in-office travel when applicable Supportive culture — A collaborative and remote-friendly team environment where people genuinely care Location We have fully remote options if you reside in one of the following states: Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, DC, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin *If you are not living in one of the states listed above, unfortunately, you will not be considered for a position at this time. Stay in touch Sign up for our newsletter to find out about career opportunities, new partnerships, and news from the broader civic tech community. Please contact the recruiting team at recruiting@navapbc.com if you would like to request reasonable accommodation during the application or interviewing process. We participate in E-Verify. Upon hire, we will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S. This role requires you to work from the contiguous United States. Equal Employment Opportunity Nava is committed to providing equal employment opportunities without discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, gender and/or gender identity or expression, color, creed, religion, religious creed, age, national origin, ethnicity, disability, veteran or military status, sex, sexual orientation, reproductive health autonomy, pregnancy, childbirth, and medical conditions related to pregnancy or childbirth, genetic information, domestic violence victim status, marital status, citizenship status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Nava prohibits any such discrimination or harassment. This policy applies to all employees, applicants, contractors, and temporary workers of Nava.

This description is a summary of our understanding of the job description. Click on 'Apply' button to find out more. Role Description There is a difference between a developer who leads and a leader who develops. This role requires both, but in the right proportion. We need someone who can look at a codebase built by one person under pressure, understand it without judging it, and chart a clear path forward that the whole team can execute. The engagement is a 12-plus month build of a custom internal platform for a US-based IT services company. The platform replaces a third-party PSA system and consolidates billing, ticketing, project management, and service delivery into one product. The existing developer is capable. What the team is missing is someone who can structure the work, raise the quality bar, and translate technical decisions into language that business stakeholders can act on. We are in the pre-sale stage. The pilot is active. We are building a shortlist now so we are ready to move the moment the engagement confirms. What You Will Own - Conducting an honest, constructive assessment of the existing codebase and identifying what needs to change and in what order - Defining the technical roadmap for 2026 and presenting it to business stakeholders in terms of tradeoffs, not just tasks - Making and documenting architecture decisions that the team can build on with confidence - Leading a small team of two to three developers, including an existing in-house developer who has been working alone for 18 months - Mentoring without micromanaging: setting standards, reviewing work, and creating an environment where the team improves over time - Conducting or co-conducting technical interviews for developers joining the team - Serving as the technical voice in client calls, translating engineering realities into business impact without oversimplifying or alarming - Ensuring delivery stays on track against a hard deadline: the platform needs to be fully operational by January 2027 Qualifications - 6 or more years in software engineering, with at least 2 years in a lead, principal, or equivalent role - A track record of taking ambiguous or under-structured codebases and creating order without creating conflict - Genuine experience communicating technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders who are engaged, opinionated, and smart - Comfort with serverless and edge computing architectures (Cloudflare Workers, AWS Lambda, or similar) - The ability to work fractionally and manage your own time and availability without being managed - Availability to lead client calls in the US CT window - A principled approach to code quality: you set standards because you believe in them, not because someone asked you to Tech Stack - Frontend: React 18, TypeScript, Vite, Shadcn/ui, TanStack Query, Zustand - Backend: Node.js on Cloudflare Workers (serverless) - Database: PostgreSQL - Auth and backend services: Supabase How We Work You will operate at the intersection of two teams: our engineers on one side, and the client's internal team on the other. The full-stack developers on the team own execution. You own direction. That distinction matters and we expect everyone to respect it. What We Offer - A technically interesting leadership challenge with real organizational complexity and a clear product vision - A fractional structure that respects your time and lets you maintain other professional commitments - A client relationship built on trust and directness, not politics - The opportunity to shape not just one engagement but the standard for how Speed and Function leads technical work - Transparent communication at every stage of the process, including honest conversations when circumstances change Company Description Speed and Function is a software engineering firm that builds custom products for growth-oriented businesses. We work on engagements where the technical and human challenges are inseparable, and we have built our reputation by treating both with equal seriousness. This engagement came through the community of founders and operators committed to long-term organizational growth. The client is not running a competitive evaluation. They chose us because of who we are and how we work. We hold that trust carefully. How to Apply Send a short message explaining your interest in this specific role and what you believe good technical leadership actually looks like in practice. Attach your CV or share your LinkedIn profile. We do not need a formal cover letter. We need to understand how you think.