Engineering Lead Manager, Cape
Platform
+ Equity
3+ days a week in office
Privacy-first mobile network
Be an early applicant
Privacy-first mobile network
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
+ 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
- Engineering Management: 3+ years experience leading software engineering teams, including managing managers. Skilled at developing engineers and managers through coaching, mentorship, and performance management
- Backend & Distributed Systems Expertise: Deep experience building, deploying, and maintaining microservices in production, with strong knowledge of distributed systems design, cloud-native architectures (AWS, Azure, or GCP), and scalable API development
- Product Feature Delivery: Proven success in leading teams that have shipped complex, end-to-end product features that created measurable user or business impact
- Strategic & Hands-On: Able to zoom between high-level technical direction and tactical problem-solving to support teams and unblock delivery
- Cross-Functional Partnership: Effective working closely with Product, Design, Security, and other Engineering Leads to align technical execution with product strategy
- Technical Talent Developer: Passionate about growing technical talent at all stages—from junior engineers to new managers—through mentorship, sponsorship, and structured development
- Operational Excellence: Deep commitment to support, observability, and incident response best practices
- Communication & Influence: Strong communicator who can clearly articulate technical and strategic decisions to engineers, peers, and executives alike
- Outcome Oriented: Get things done. Not every solution needs to be perfect or exquisite. The best solutions are the ones that work and solve the problem on the necessary timelines
What the job involves
- We are relentless builders, constantly pushing the boundaries of what's possible and bringing to life ideas that have never before existed
- Innovation is at the core of everything we do
- At Cape, we trust our team to deliver greatness and empower them to make a profound impact
- As a member of our team, you will collaborate seamlessly with our diverse group of talented engineers and other team members, enjoying dynamic interactions with colleagues from across the organization
- Cape is hiring a Lead Software Engineer to manage backend engineering teams building distributed, cloud-native & on-prem systems and user-facing product features
- You’ll lead a team that includes first-time managers, drive the technical and people strategy, and work closely with Product and Design to ship scalable, reliable features that move the business forward
- We're looking for a builder, mentor, and leader who thrives on developing technical talent and delivering high-quality systems at scale
- This role reports to our founding engineer and Head of Engineering, Stephen Dowhy
- Technical Leadership: Scope problems, provide technical mentorship, craft architecture, review technical designs, and manage technical execution to deliver solutions to problems on relevant timelines
- Career & Personal Development: Manage and mentor teams of engineers and emerging managers. Provide coaching, structured feedback, and career development paths for engineers across all levels of experience
- Product Design & Delivery: Generate ideas, architecture, and execute on net new products & features to drive business direction and growth
- Distributed Systems Ownership: Ensure that distributed services are designed and built with reliability, observability, and security in mind, aligned with Cape’s standards for performance and scalability across both on-prem and cloud
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with other Engineering Leads, Product Managers, Designers, and Business Development to define scope, prioritize work, and ensure end-to-end delivery of product initiatives
- Culture Building: Foster an environment of trust, respect, collaboration, learning, and continuous improvement across your teams
- Hiring & Scaling: Drive hiring for your teams, working closely with Talent and Engineering Leadership to attract, assess, and retain top technical talent
- Process Evolution: Champion engineering best practices for feature development, code review, deployment, incident response, and technical documentation
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 will help grow the company's market share as well.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Mar 2025
$15m
SERIES B
Apr 2024
$40m
SERIES B
Total funding: $76m
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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