Software Engineer, Developer Experience

New York, Washington
Full-time

About the role

We are looking for a Developer Experience Engineer with 4+ years of experience to join Cape — America's privacy-first mobile carrier — and make every engineer on the team measurably faster. Cape recently closed its Series C and is scaling its engineering org from ~70 to well beyond that, making this the perfect inflection point to bring on a high-agency, senior engineer who can own the internal platforms, CI/CD pipelines, and developer tooling that the entire organization depends on. You'll be the first dedicated DevEx hire, with the potential to grow into a tech lead or manager as the function scales. This is a product role where your customers are world-class engineers building cryptographic primitives and 5G core network functions — and your job is to get out of their way.

What will you be doing?

  • Own and improve Cape's CI/CD pipelines, local development environments, and internal tooling to eliminate friction across the entire engineering org — with a particular focus on improving how the team writes and ships Go

  • Work cross-functionally with platform, product, infrastructure, network, and security teams to identify pain points, prioritize the highest-impact improvements, and ship solutions that make engineers faster

  • Evaluate and shape Cape's AI-assisted development strategy — deciding what tools to adopt, building guardrails, and measuring real productivity impact

  • Establish developer experience standards, documentation, and runbooks that scale with the team as Cape grows aggressively post-Series C

  • Act as a high-ownership, senior technical leader who can mentor future DevEx hires and tell the team what they should be doing better — not just execute on a predefined roadmap

About Cape

Cape is America's privacy-first mobile carrier, delivering private, secure, and resilient cellular service to government agencies, enterprises, and consumers. Built on its own mobile core and SIMs, Cape collects only the minimum data needed to provide service, deletes it quickly, and never sells it. Cape subscribers get protections that traditional carriers don't offer, including daily identifier rotation, SIM swap protection, network lock, secondary phone numbers, disappearing call logs, and secure global roaming. Cape is the only U.S. mobile carrier with SOC 2 Type 2 certification across all five trust criteria, and its service is trusted by national security professionals, enterprise executives, journalists, and activists. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, Cape has raised $191 million from investors including Bain Capital Ventures, IVP, Andreessen Horowitz, A*, 01 Advisors, and Point72 Ventures. It was named a 2026 Fast Company World Changing Ideas award winner. For more information about Cape, please visit www.cape.co.

Required skills

Go
Rust
TypeScript
React
Python
Protocol Buffers (Protobuf)
Docker
Kubernetes
GitHub Actions
Buildkite
Bazel
CI/CD
Sigstore
Cosign
GitHub Copilot
Claude Code
Cursor
Terraform

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Job details

Salary

$225,000 - $275,000

Location

New York, Washington

Experience

4+ years

Company

NameCape
Industrydefense, government, cybersecurity, security, enterprise

Funding

Total raised

$191M

Last stage

Growth

Investors

Bain Capital Ventures
IVP
AA*
Andreessen Horowitz
Costanoa Ventures

Founders

JD

John Doyle

Co-Founder & CEO

NE

Nicholas Espinoza

Co-Founder & Head of R&D

What happens next.

No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.

01

Confirm the fit

A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.

02

I pitch you to the company

I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.

03

A meeting lands on your calendar

If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.