Software Engineer, Developer Experience

About Cape

Cape is America’s privacy-first mobile carrier. Our mission is to be a force for good in global wireless. Cape was founded in 2022 by people who believe privacy is a fundamental right, not a luxury to be traded away. Our journey began when our founder recognized a critical vulnerability in our modern world: everyone relies on the same stagnant cellular infrastructure and legacy systems that track our every movement, monitor and profile our connections, and lose and sell our personal data.

Instead of accepting the status quo, we decided to fix it. National security professionals, journalists, parents, and everyone in between can stay connected and have privacy.

We didn’t just build a layer on top of old tech; we built America’s most private and secure mobile carrier from the ground up. By building our own network from scratch, we are able to design and build a suite of privacy and security features that no other carrier on the planet can offer.

Today, Cape provides our secure network to consumers, businesses, and government agencies alike. We closed our Series C in March 2026, and we are scaling rapidly, with the goal of giving people back control of their most personal information.

The Team

At Cape, we are the architects of a privacy-centric movement that is just getting started. We are relentless builders, constantly innovating at the edge of what's possible in telecommunications. We operate on a foundation of high trust and high expectations. Our structure is flat, and collaboration matters more than hierarchy. As a member of our team, you will collaborate with world-class engineers, architects, and visionaries, and work across organizational lines to solve "impossible" problems and deliver mission-critical results for our users every single day.

The Role

Cape's engineering team is small by design and ambitious by nature. We build cryptographic primitives, 5G core network functions, zero-trust edge systems, and threat detection pipelines — problems that don't have StackOverflow answers. The people doing that work deserve an environment that gets out of their way.

As a Developer Experience Engineer, your job is to make Cape's engineers measurably faster, less frustrated, and more confident in what they ship. That means owning the internal platforms, tooling, and workflows that engineering depends on — from CI/CD pipelines and local development environments to AI-assisted development workflows, test infrastructure, and release processes. This is not a support role. It is a product role where the customer is the engineering organization, the product is the development loop, and quality is measured in time-to-merge, build reliability, AI-augmented velocity, and the number of times an engineer has to context-switch to deal with infrastructure instead of product.

You will work across the full engineering organization — embedded closely with platform, product, and security teams — and report to engineering leadership. Your impact will be felt by every engineer at Cape.

What You'll Work On

Developer Tooling and Environments:

Build and maintain the internal tooling, scripts, and SDKs that Cape engineers use daily — from project scaffolding and local dev setup to testing utilities and debugging aids

Own the local development environment story: containerized setups, secrets management, service dependencies, and onboarding time for new engineers

Evaluate and introduce new tools thoughtfully — instrument adoption, gather feedback, and deprecate what isn't working

Write the documentation and runbooks that make complex infrastructure accessible to engineers who shouldn't need to become infrastructure experts to use it

Design and implement infrastructure that enables engineers to go from code to deployed artifact quickly and with high confidence, regardless of which product surface they're working on

Drive reliability improvements that eliminate common failure modes: flaky tests, non-reproducible builds, slow pipelines, and environment drift between local and CI

AI Tooling and AI-Assisted Development:

Own Cape’s AI-assisted development strategy — evaluate, integrate, and configure AI coding tools (code completion, automated review, agentic coding assistants) so engineers get high-quality suggestions that respect our security and compliance requirements

Build guardrails and context systems that make AI tools effective in Cape’s codebase — prompt engineering for internal tooling, retrieval-augmented generation over internal docs, and repository-aware configurations that keep AI suggestions relevant and safe

Measure the productivity impact of AI tooling rigorously — track adoption, code acceptance rates, time savings, and quality metrics to separate hype from genuine acceleration

Stay ahead of the rapidly evolving AI development tooling landscape and bring informed recommendations to engineering leadership on what to adopt, what to build internally, and what to avoid

Engineering Culture and Standards:

Identify patterns of friction across the engineering organization through observation, surveys, and direct partnership with teams — then prioritize and eliminate them

Contribute to engineering standards around testing, code review, and deployment practices that help Cape's engineers ship with speed and confidence

Set a high bar for the developer experience through your own work — write code that other engineers will be glad to depend on

Experience

4+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful time spent on internal platforms, developer tooling, or infrastructure

A track record of identifying developer friction, building solutions, and measuring the improvement — not just shipping tooling

Fluency in at least one modern backend language — Go is strongly preferred; Python, TypeScript, or Rust also welcome

Hands-on experience improving and optimizing CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions, Buildkite, Bazel, or similar) at engineering-team scale

Strong understanding of containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, or other containers.

Strong written and verbal communication skills — you can explain infrastructure tradeoffs to engineers who didn't ask for a lecture and write docs that actually get read

Nice to Have

Experience building developer platforms in security-constrained environments (FedRAMP, DISA STIGs, or government compliance frameworks)

Familiarity with software supply chain security: artifact signing (Sigstore, Cosign), SBOM generation, dependency auditing

Experience at a high-growth startup where the engineering team scaled rapidly and tooling had to keep pace

Background in observability tooling: distributed tracing, metrics pipelines, and making complex systems legible to engineers

Experience integrating AI coding assistants (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) into engineering workflows, including prompt tuning, context management, and measuring productivity impact

Active U.S. security clearance or eligibility and willingness to obtain one

Compensation

We offer competitive compensation that is geo-adjusted based on your location, along with meaningful equity so you share in the value you help create. Salary range for this role in New York, New York is $225,000-$275,000 depending on experience and interview performance.

Our benefits include:

401(k) match

100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision premiums for you and your dependents

12 weeks paid parental leave (for all parents, no waiting period)

Stipends for

Family-forming needs

Gender-affirming care

Unlimited PTO

Our Culture & Values

We hire excellent people, give them outsized responsibility, and trust them to execute. Every person at Cape has a proven track record of tackling hard problems and winning.

We believe that personal privacy and national security are not at odds, and that they can be reconciled through strong technology.

We believ