Senior Principal Solutions Architect

8th Light

Senior Principal Solutions Architect at 8th Light collaborating with clients on architecture challenges. Providing hands-on technical leadership and mapping data dependencies for enterprise solutions.

Posted 6/17/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesSenior💰 $173,585 - $252,906 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSCassandraDistributed SystemsGraphQLJavaKafkaKubernetesTypeScript

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

As a go-to architect and strategist within 8th Light, you'll partner with one or two clients a year on their hardest architecture challenges, while deepening your and our collective expertise over the course of your career with us.
This role sits at the intersection of long-term planning and hands-on technical leadership. You'll work across the enterprise to map data dependencies, drive legacy modernization, and define how domains like pricing fit into a broader enterprise data and AI ecosystem. One day that might mean aligning teams to deliver new low-latency data sets; the next, running architecture trade-off analysis with senior product, design, and business leadership.
A significant part of the work involves mapping application dependencies and capabilities, building an enterprise-wide context graph, and contributing to an MCP server built on enterprise architecture tooling, all aimed at giving teams (and the AI-assisted tools they use) the context to make better design, trade-off, and risk decisions.
Day-to-day output is hands-on architecture and design: planning artifacts, architecture diagrams, decision records, and roadmap contributions. This isn't a feature-delivery role, but you'll need enough data and technical depth to make well-informed calls, design real systems, and build credibility with technical stakeholders.

Requirements

What you’ll need

Deep experience in enterprise architecture at scale, across large, distributed systems
Strong data fluency, dependency mapping, data mesh enablement, high-availability and low-latency design
Hands-on experience with the stack: Kubernetes, Kafka, Cassandra, Java, TypeScript, AWS, protobuf, Databricks, GraphQL, and REST
Comfort using AI-assisted development and agentic coding tools to accelerate delivery and enable non-technical teams
A track record of working across teams on complex, multi-stakeholder technical decisions, including trade-off and risk analysis (e.g. SPADE, architecture decision records)
Credibility and trust building across a group including executives who will be focused on business value and senior technical stakeholders who will be focused on implementation
Strong domain-driven design instincts and comfort with the ambiguity of both greenfield and legacy work

Benefits

Comp & perks

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

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Hard Skills & Tools

enterprise architecturedata fluencydependency mappingdata mesh enablementhigh-availability designlow-latency designKubernetesKafkaCassandraJava

Soft Skills

technical leadershipcredibility buildingtrust buildingcross-team collaborationtrade-off analysisrisk analysiscommunicationstrategic planningproblem-solvingadaptability