Principal Software Engineer

Start with the data pipeline, range across the full stack, and help take a mature, revenue-earning platform to the next level, with AI at the center of how you build.

About Northern Light

Northern Light provides the world's most sophisticated machine learning-powered competitive intelligence platform for market research. For over 25 years, we've been helping Fortune 1000 enterprises make smarter, faster, and more informed decisions through our award-winning SinglePoint knowledge management platform. Our clients include global leaders across technology, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and life sciences who depend on us to transform fragmented data into strategic clarity.

We're a company that takes pride in our compulsive drive to provide exceptional client support. We wake up each day ready to tackle the challenges of knowledge management and we never stand still. Our recent innovations include generative AI capabilities, machine learning insights, and advanced competitive intelligence automation.

The Product: Search Over Content Nobody Else Has Assembled

SinglePoint is an enterprise search and market-intelligence platform. We license content from a large number of publishers and research vendors, combine it with each customer's own internal documents, normalize all of it, enrich it, index it into per-customer search databases, and serve it through a customer-specific portal with search, analytics, NLP enrichment, and AI summarization and Q&A.

Our customers are research and strategy teams at large enterprises. When they can't find something, it costs them a decision.

The Opportunity

Northern Light is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to start in our content pipeline and grow into ownership across the full platform. The pipeline brings in content from well over a hundred vendor feeds, makes it consistent, and makes it searchable for every customer. From there, the whole platform is open to you: services, search, AI features, and the customer portals.

It all works, it earns real revenue, and it's ready for its next chapter. We're looking for someone who sees a 25-year-old platform as an opportunity, reaches for AI tools by default, and gets genuinely excited about making something proven dramatically better.

What You'll Do

• Build and maintain ingestion for new vendor feeds and new customers, from the vendor's delivery quirks through to documents appearing in a customer's search results.
• Shape how vendor content is transformed into a consistent, reliable format customers can trust.
• Migrate legacy pipelines onto the current stack, including an ongoing Perl-to-Python effort and a newer move toward containerized, contract-bound services.
• Help replace convention-driven job scheduling with explicit, durable workflows.
• Track down production content problems and fix them at the root.
• Bring AI into the pipeline itself, using ML, NLP, LLMs, and AI tooling to classify, enrich, and validate content, and to speed up how we build and migrate.
• Work across the full stack, from back-end services to the customer portals (PHP and React/TypeScript), following problems and ideas all the way from the vendor to what the customer sees.

Who We Hire: AI-First Builders Who Finish What They Start

You can take a task that isn't fully specified, go find the missing context yourself, and drive it until it is running in production, verified against the behavior it replaced, and the thing it replaced is switched off. Not “my part is done.” Done.

Transforming a mature system takes creativity and energy as much as rigor. We want someone who brings fresh ideas, shares them freely, and makes the people around them better.

What We're Looking For

• A track record of delivering production software. Things you built that real users depend on, and that you kept running.
• Comfort in code you didn't write. Much of this estate is older than the people working on it. You can read an unfamiliar system, form an accurate model of it, and change it safely.
• Strong data pipeline instincts. You build pipelines that are reliable and repeatable, and you can prove a new one matches the old one before you cut over.
• Operational comfort. Containers, CI/CD, and enough production instinct to know whether your change is actually live.
• An AI-first way of working. You use AI coding assistants, LLMs, and agents every day, and you have ideas about where they can make a pipeline smarter.
• Collaborative energy. Small team, big ambitions. You share ideas freely, write down what you learn, and make the people around you better.
• Judgment about scope. You know when to fix the root cause and when to ship the narrow thing and record the debt.

Languages: No Language Requirement

What runs here today is mostly Python, Rust, PHP, and React, plus some long-lived Perl. New backend work is mostly Python and Rust; the portals are PHP and React.

We don't require any of these on your rsum. We hire for judgment, for the ability to pick up whatever the problem happens to be written in, and for finishing. If you have been strong in two or three languages, you'll be fine in ours.

One honest note: you will read Perl in this job. You don't have to love it. You do have to be willing.

Helps, But Not Required

• Building with LLMs, embeddings, or AI agents in production
• Web crawling and scraping at scale (Scrapy or equivalent)
• Search and information retrieval: indexing, relevance, faceting
• Durable workflow engines such as Temporal or Airflow
• Rust
• Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform
• PHP
• Working with licensed third-party data feeds

Job Details

Job Type: Full-Time

Location: Hybrid in the Boston, MA area, with regular time at our Somerville office, Eastern Time working hours.

Work authorization requirements: Must be authorized to work in the United States (unfortunately, we cannot sponsor visas).

Why Join Northern Light

• Join a company shaping the future of competitive and market intelligence.
• Work with a collaborative, high-performing team that values creativity, experimentation, and measurable results.
• Put AI at the center of how you build, with the room to bring new ideas into a platform customers already rely on.
• Range across the full stack, from vendor feeds to the customer-facing portals.
• Competitive salary, benefits, and professional growth opportunities.
• Regular team offsites and opportunities for cross-functional collaboration.

Working at Northern Light

Northern Light is based in the Boston, MA area. Northern Light is proud to provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws. Northern Light SinglePoint, LLC participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with Form I-9 information to confirm employment eligibility for all new hires. For more information, visit www.e-verify.gov.

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.