Software Engineer, Cape
Product Platform
$200-290k
+ Equity
3 days a week in office
Privacy-first mobile network
Open for applications
Privacy-first mobile network
101-200 employees
Open for applications
$200-290k
+ Equity
3 days a week in office
101-200 employees
Company mission
To reimagine connectivity in this mobile-first world, with privacy and security at the core.
Role
Who you are
- Autonomy: A proven ability to learn continuously, work independently, and make decisions with minimal supervision
- Partnership: Experience brainstorming and iterating alongside product managers and designers
- Pragmatism: The ability to move quickly while building for the long term. You take a thoughtful, practical approach to solving complex problems, considering tradeoffs and avoiding over-engineering
- Adaptability: Comfort working in a constantly evolving environment with dynamic objectives and direct user iteration
- Communication: The ability to work collaboratively with both technical and non-technical teammates, understanding how technical decisions impact the end user
- Mission-Driven: A deep-seated belief in the importance of digital privacy and security. You understand that the code we ship has real-world consequences and are driven to build systems that protect and empower users
- 7+ years of experience building and operating scalable backend systems in one or more modern languages (we're primarily a Go shop)
- A strong foundation in Computer Science - algorithms, data structures, and distributed systems demonstrated through the systems you've built
- Hands-on distributed systems experience: you've designed and operated services that communicate through queues and async workflows, and you know idempotency, retries, and schema migrations from production experience
- Experience leading a significant re-architecture or migration on a live system, end to end
- Strong written and verbal communication skills - you work through designs and decisions in writing and bring others along
What the job involves
- The Product Platform team owns the foundational services that power Cape: Identity & Access, Subscriber Lifecycle, Provisioning, Billing, Reporting, Spam Protection, and Voicemail. You will work closely with Product, Mobile, and SRE teams to enable new features, and you will own features that span multiple foundational components end to end
- We’re hiring engineers who are passionate about solving real-world problems, personal privacy, and empowering peers to be autonomous. Our team needs experienced engineers who have strong distributed systems backgrounds to help us re-architect these systems as we scale into our next phase
- This includes re-organizing services for maintainability and extensibility as we grow in features and people, and adopting the right service infrastructure (workflow orchestration, service tooling, CI/CD) and data infrastructure (Postgres, Redis, streaming materialized views, data lake). Your day-to-day will constantly change and be filled with ambiguity, but everything you work on has a high impact
- Cape is a flat organization and we don't have formal levels. For calibration: this is a Senior/Staff scope role - you'll own architecture across systems and make decisions that stick
- Enable Scale: Build reliable, extensible systems that let us grow in features, users, and engineers including re-architecting existing services and migrating live flows onto new systems safely
- Own the Lifecycle: Take full ownership of features that span multiple foundational components from problem discovery through design, deployment, and operations
- Raise the Bar: Make safe change the default - end-to-end testing, continuous deployment, zero-downtime migrations, and hold a high standard through design and code review
- Collaborate: Work closely with Product, Mobile, SRE, and Design to shape features and the infrastructure they run on, bringing stakeholders along through clear written proposals
- Mentor: Grow the engineers around you through pairing, review, and written designs, transferring ownership of what you build
Our take
The massive amounts of data that telecom companies hold on their customers, and the various weak spots in mobile networks, offer many lucrative possibilities for hackers. With massive mobile network data breaches affecting the likes of US telecom giant AT&T, Cape is a mobile network responding with a way to reconcile personal privacy and national security.
Cape positions itself as a privacy-first mobile network, offering 5G and 4G speeds with more privacy. It collects minimal personally identifiable information from its customers as well as offering spam protection, hardened account security and firewall. The network itself piggybacks on existing cellular networks and uses advanced encryption and data protocols to protect its customers.
The company has attracted good investment and secured contracts with the US military because of the network's ability to contribute to national security. Cape only came out of stealth in 2024, though, and its first steps will be to provide its users with eSIMs. A partnership with UScellular has helped grow the company's market share, and it's now available nationwide. 2026 Series C funding is being used to further grow its customer base and accelerate R&D efforts.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Mar 2026
$100m
SERIES C
Mar 2025
$15m
SERIES B
Total funding: $176m
Company benefits
- Medical insurance
- Vision insurance
- Dental insurance
- 401(k)
- Paid maternity leave
- Paid paternity leave
- Commuter benefits
- Disability insurance
Company HQ
North Rosslyn, Arlington, VA
Leadership
John Doyle
(Founder & CEO)Currently Board Member at Vannevar Labs. Previously held positions at Palantir Technologies and was a Judicial Law Clerk at Eastern District of Virginia.
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