Software Engineer, Developer Experience

About the role

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. 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. 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 do

Evaluate and introduce new developer tools thoughtfully, instrument adoption, gather feedback, and deprecate tooling that does not serve the velocity and reliability goals of Cape's engineering organization.

Design, implement, and maintain the local development environment story, including containerized setups, secrets management, service dependencies, and onboarding workflows that dramatically reduce time-to-productivity for new engineers.

Own the CI/CD pipeline architecture and reliability, eliminating common failure modes such as flaky tests, non-reproducible builds, slow pipelines, and environment drift between local and production systems.

Build and maintain internal SDKs, project scaffolding tools, and developer libraries that Cape engineers use daily to integrate services and ship features safely and consistently.

Write clear, actionable documentation and runbooks that make complex infrastructure accessible to engineers who should not need to become infrastructure experts to use Cape platforms effectively.

Design and implement infrastructure that enables engineers to go from code commit to deployed artifact quickly and with high confidence, regardless of the product surface or deployment target.

Own the AI-assisted development strategy for Cape, evaluating, integrating, and configuring AI coding tools such as code completion and automated review agents to ensure high-quality suggestions that respect our security and compliance requirements.

Build guardrails and context systems for AI tooling, including prompt engineering for internal tooling, retrieval-augmented generation over internal documentation, and repository-aware configurations that keep AI suggestions relevant, safe, and secure.

Measure the productivity impact of AI tooling rigorously by tracking adoption, code acceptance rates, time savings, and quality metrics to separate hype from genuine acceleration in the development loop.

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 phase out based on measured outcomes.

Collaborate closely with platform, product, and security teams to align tooling and workflows with product roadmaps, security policies, and compliance obligations across Cape's services.

Drive reliability improvements across the developer lifecycle by identifying and fixing common failure modes in build, test, and deploy systems to maximize engineering throughput and minimize context switching.

Contribute to the definition and evolution of Cape's engineering best practices, standards, and architecture decisions that enable scalable, secure, and maintainable systems.

Engage with the broader software engineering community by sharing learnings, proposing patterns, and helping to grow the developer experience discipline across Cape's rapidly expanding organization.

Requirements

You have a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

You have 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong track record of building and maintaining developer platforms or internal tools.

You are proficient in at least one modern programming language such as Python, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, or Rust, and you can learn new languages and frameworks quickly to build robust internal tools.

You have deep experience with CI/CD systems and software supply chain concepts, including containerization, artifact management, and infrastructure as code.

You understand networking fundamentals, distributed systems, and at least one cloud provider's core services relevant to building secure, scalable platforms.

You have hands-on experience with observability, monitoring, and debugging practices for distributed systems and can translate this into actionable insights for developers.

You are comfortable working with security and compliance constraints, including data protection regulations and secure software development practices.

You have strong written and verbal communication skills and can translate complex technical concepts into clear documentation and guidance for a wide audience of engineers.

Nice to have

Experience contributing to open source developer tools or maintaining large-scale internal developer platforms.

Practical notes

This role is based in New York, New York, and requires availability during standard business hours.

Employment is full-time and eligible for Cape's comprehensive benefits package upon completion of onboarding requirements.

Cape is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.