Principal Software Engineer - Boston MA

Take a platform that already works, already earns real revenue, and already serves some of the world's largest research teams, and make it dramatically better with AI at the center of how you build.

Why This Role

Real ownership, fast. On a small team, a principal engineer's decisions show up in production and in front of customers quickly. You start in the content pipeline and grow into ownership across the full platform.

AI-first by default. You'll use AI coding assistants, LLMs, and agents every day, and you'll put AI into the product itself to classify, enrich, and validate content at scale.

A proven business to build on. 25+ years, Fortune 1000 customers, and real revenue. You'll be making something people already pay for dramatically better, not chasing product-market fit.

Content nobody else has assembled. Well over a hundred licensed vendor feeds, combined with each customer's own documents. The data problems here are hard and interesting.

Pay posted up front. $175,000 – $215,000, plus benefits and regular team offsites.

Hybrid in Somerville. Two days a week in our Somerville office with the team, the rest remote.

The Opportunity

SinglePoint is an enterprise search and market-intelligence platform built on content nobody else has assembled. We license content from a large number of publishers and research vendors, combine it with each customer's own internal documents, normalize and enrich all of it, and serve it through customer-specific portals 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.

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

Own ingestion end to end. Bring on new vendor feeds and new customers, from a vendor's delivery quirks all the way to documents showing up in a customer's search results.

Make content trustworthy. Shape how vendor content is transformed into a consistent, reliable format customers can count on.

Modernize the stack. Lead migrations onto the current stack, including an ongoing Perl-to-Python effort and a move toward containerized, contract-bound services.

Replace convention with durability. Help move convention-driven job scheduling onto explicit, durable workflows.

Fix things at the root. Track down production content problems and solve them for good.

Put AI to work in the pipeline. Use ML, NLP, LLMs, and AI tooling to classify, enrich, and validate content, and to speed up how we build and migrate.

Range across the full stack. Follow problems and ideas from back-end services to the customer portals (PHP and React/TypeScript), all the way from the vendor to what the customer sees.

What Success Looks Like

First 30 days: You've shipped your first change to production and built a working map of how content flows from vendor to portal.

First 90 days: You've owned a new vendor feed or customer onboarding end to end, and you've put forward your first ideas for where AI can make the pipeline smarter.

First year: You've led a major migration through cutover and switch-off, AI-driven enrichment or validation is running in production, and the team works faster because you're here.

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.

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.

Our Values, and What They Look Like in This Role

Our five core values aren't wall art. They shape how we work together, and they're part of how every person here is reviewed.

Integrity. Do what you say you will do and see commitments through. Here, that means "done" is running in production, verified, and the old system switched off.

Innovation. Keep looking for new ideas, technologies, and approaches that wow our customers and ourselves. Here, that means reaching for AI by default and seeing a 25-year-old platform as a place to invent.

Energy. Bring enthusiasm that energizes others, and collaborate across teams toward shared goals. On a small team with big ambitions, your ideas and momentum are contagious.

Excellence. Raise the bar on code, product, and customer experience. You build pipelines that are reliable, repeatable, and proven against what they replace.

Transparency. Communicate openly about decisions, challenges, and direction, and own your mistakes. When you ship the narrow fix, you record the debt so everyone knows the plan.

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 résumé. 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

About Northern Light

For over 25 years, Northern Light has helped Fortune 1000 enterprises make smarter, faster, and more informed decisions through SinglePoint, our award-winning, machine learning-powered market and competitive intelligence platform. Our clients include global leaders across technology, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and life sciences who depend on us to transform fragmented data into strategic clarity.

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.