---
title: 'Software Engineer, Developer Experience at Cape'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-developer-experience-cape-new-york-qm0na7rrcv0z'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Software Engineer, Developer Experience at Cape

- **Company:** Cape
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-06-18
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cape/13f3921d-ace0-40e4-9b82-e00630878197

## Job description

## 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 believe companies exist to build awesome things and take care of the people who build them, so we offer top-tier healthcare, 401(k) matching, and a generous vacation policy that our team actually uses to recharge.
- We believe that a stronger company and a better product are built by people from all walks of life. We hire without regard to race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, disability, or Veteran status. If you are great at what you do, you belong here.

How to apply Click the link below to apply. We reserve the right to make use of any unsolicited resumes received from outside recruiting agencies and / or individual recruiters without being responsible for payment of any fees asserted from the use of unsolicited resumes. We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin, and without regard to disability or status as a protected veteran, or any other status protected by law.

## About Cape

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Cape is a privacy-first mobile network operator that provides secure, private cellular service with minimal data collection and advanced security features for individuals and organizations.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C)
- **Headquarters**: Arlington, Virginia, USA
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: John Doyle

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Telecommunications, Mobile Network Operator (MVNO), Privacy & Security
- **Target customers**: B2C (privacy-conscious consumers), B2B (enterprises), B2G (federal government, military, national security professionals)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "Connectivity shouldn't cost you your privacy and security. We're redesigning telecommunications from the ground up for everyone from national security professionals to everyday people ready to take back control of their mobile identity." [cape.co](https://www.cape.co/about)

## Products & Services
- **Cape Mobile Service**: A premium MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) offering private and secure cell phone service with features including:
  - Minimal data collection (only what's needed to provide service, deleted as soon as possible)
  - SIM swap protection
  - Signaling protection
  - Secure global roaming
  - Network Lock
  - Identifier Rotation
  - Disappearing Call Logs
  - Encrypted voicemail
  - Private payments
  - Unlimited Talk and Text
- **Cape Obscura**: Selected as one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2025 [cape.co](https://www.cape.co/about)
- **Partnership Offerings**: Cape partners with Proton to provide Cape subscribers with Proton Unlimited or Proton VPN Plus [cape.co](https://www.cape.co/about)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Total Funding**: $181.6M across 6 rounds [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/capecellular)
  - Series C (March 2026): $100M co-led by Bain Capital Ventures and IVP
  - Series B (April 2024): $40M led by Andreessen Horowitz
  - Series A (June 2023): $21.4M
  - Debt Financing (March 2025): $15M from Silicon Valley Bank
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of $181.6M
- **Notable Investors/Partners**:
  - **Investors**: Bain Capital Ventures, IVP, Andreessen Horowitz, Silicon Valley Bank
  - **Partners**: Proton (digital privacy leader), Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), GrapheneOS project [cape.co](https://www.cape.co/about)
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Named among Fast Company's 2024 Most Innovative Companies [cape.co](https://www.cape.co/about)
  - Cape Obscura selected as one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2025
  - Recognized in the 2025 Military and Aerospace Electronics Innovators Awards Program
  - Officially emerged from beta into general availability (October 2025) [cape.co](https://www.cape.co/about)
  - Active job postings up 93.8% year-over-year [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/capecellular)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Privacy-by-design**: Collects minimal data, deletes it as soon as possible, never sells data — a true differentiator in the telecom industry
- **Security-first architecture**: Features like SIM swap protection, identifier rotation, disappearing call logs, and signaling protection are built-in, not bolt-ons
- **Deep expertise**: Founded by privacy-first innovators with deep expertise in security, telecom, and technology [cape.co](https://www.cape.co/about)
- **Federal & defense credibility**: Has a dedicated Federal Engineering team, Solutions Architects for the Air Force, and a Head of Navy Business — indicating strong traction in government/military sectors
- **Ecosystem partnerships**: Partnerships with EFF (providing free/discounted service to journalists and activists), Proton, and GrapheneOS create a strong community moat

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Expanding general availability post-beta, growing federal/defense business, scaling engineering team, building out APAC operations (Head of APAC hired)
- **Direction for growth**: Becoming the default mobile carrier for security-conscious individuals, enterprises, and government agencies; expanding international presence (operates in 6 countries including India, Canada, South Korea, Australia, and UK) [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/capecellular)

## Why Work Here
- **Culture highlights**:
  - Values: "Do excellent work," "Bias to action" (outcomes over process), "Overshare" (transparency), "Respect the opportunity" (building for mission-critical work) [cape.co](https://www.cape.co/careers)
  - "We don't accept 'the way things are done;' we're hackers who challenge the status quo and redefine the best way to do something. We make 10,000 mistakes, but own each one, and insist on learning quickly." [cape.co](https://www.cape.co/careers)
  - Small, autonomous teams with high ownership
- **Remote/hybrid/office policy**: Hybrid — offices in New York, NY; Arlington, VA; and Washington, DC; with some remote roles available [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/capecellular)
- **Notable perks & benefits** [cape.co](https://www.cape.co/careers):
  - 100% of insurance premiums covered for employee and dependents (Medical, Dental, Vision)
  - "Take what you need" PTO policy
  - Fully paid parental leave (12+ weeks for all parents)
  - 401k with 4% match
  - $20,000 family forming stipend (IVF, adoption, surrogacy)
  - $20,000 gender affirming care stipend
  - 12 weeks military leave with "make-whole" differential pay
- **Engineering culture**: 26% of employees are in technical roles; strong talent pipeline from Palantir, Anduril, Amazon Web Services, and Andreessen Horowitz [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/capecellular)
- **Open roles**: 31 active job postings including Senior Security Engineer, Full Stack Software Engineer, Software Engineer (Infrastructure, iOS, Android), Head of Federal Engineering, Solutions Architect (Air Force, East Asia), VP of Engineering [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/capecellular) [cape.co](https://www.cape.co/careers)

## Sources
1. [cape.co - About](https://www.cape.co/about)
2. [cape.co - Careers](https://www.cape.co/careers)
3. [cape.co - Home](https://www.cape.co/?g=int)
4. [linkedin.com - Cape Company Page](https://www.linkedin.com/company/capecellular)
5. [craft.co - Cape Company Profile](https://craft.co/cape-mobile)

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