Forward Deployed Engineer (Federal)

Cape • Washington, DC

64d • $175,000 - $235,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Cape is America’s privacy-first mobile carrier, founded in 2022 with the mission to be a force for good in global wireless. Recognizing a critical vulnerability in the existing cellular infrastructure that tracks, monitors, and sells personal data, Cape has built its own private and secure mobile carrier from the ground up. This allows for unique privacy and security features. Cape provides its secure network to consumers, businesses, and government agencies, and is rapidly scaling after closing its Series C in March 2026. The team at Cape consists of relentless builders and innovators in telecommunications, operating on a foundation of high trust and high expectations, collaborating to solve complex problems and deliver mission-critical results.

Requirements

• 2+ years of experience in a software engineering or forward deployed engineering role
• Demonstrated technical competency across multiple domains—a “Swiss army knife” profile who can credibly code, debug networking issues, reason about systems-level tradeoffs, and learn quickly
• Strong ability to scope ambiguous problems, sequence delivery, and make sound prioritization calls without explicit instruction
• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to brief a flag officer, write a clear engineering ticket, and run a customer working session with equal fluency
• High ownership and resourcefulness—comfort with the parts of the job that aren’t glamorous, and a track record of doing whatever needs to be done to deliver
• Demonstrated ability to engage directly with customers to scope technical requirements and deliver against them end to end
• U.S. citizenship and eligibility for a U.S. Top Secret security clearance (active TS strongly preferred)
• Willingness to travel up to 50% to customer sites, military installations, and partner locations
• Washington, DC or New York-based or willing to relocate

Nice To Haves

• Active TS/SCI clearance
• Prior military service, government civilian experience, or time in roles involving communications, signals, cyber, or intelligence
• Experience in a hands-on technical role with significant customer facing responsibilities—for example, a former FDE in a high growth startup, a startup engineer who carried customer deployments, or a defense tech deployment engineer (Palantir, Anduril, Shield AI, etc.)
• Background in mobile networks, telecom, networking infrastructure, or cybersecurity
• Experience as an early engineer or operator at a high-growth startup—comfort with the ambiguity, pace, and missing infrastructure that comes with sub-100-person companies
• Experience teaching, mentoring, or onboarding technical teammates
• Track record of taking field-driven feature work into a core product roadmap

Responsibilities

• Own the technical delivery of Cape’s products into federal and national security customer environments—from first prototype through operational acceptance and sustainment
• Embed with customer teams around the world to understand workflows, threat models, and constraints that don’t appear in any requirements document
• Configure, integrate, and tune Cape’s mobile core capabilities against the specific mission profile of each deployment
• Lead customer exercises, pilots, and demonstrations; structure them to produce decision-quality evidence rather than theater
• Provide direct technical support during live operations and incidents; conduct root-cause analyses and drive preventive fixes back into the platform
• Write production-grade code to build the glue, integrations, tooling, and one-off capabilities that unblock customer deployments
• Prototype new product features in the field, validate them against real mission use, and work with core engineering teams to expand on successful hypotheses
• Make sound tradeoffs between bespoke customer work and reusable platform investment—default toward the platform when the pattern repeats
• Translate customer mission requirements into clear, prioritized engineering asks; translate engineering constraints back into language program officers and operators can act on
• Advocate internally for customer priorities with concrete evidence: deployment data, operator quotes, blocking issues, and the cost of inaction
• Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to inform the roadmap—surfacing patterns across deployments that warrant platform investment versus one-off solutions
• Partner with Business Development and Solutions Architects on captures, pilots, and follow-on opportunities; provide the technical credibility that converts pilots into programs of record

Benefits

• Competitive compensation that is geo-adjusted based on your location
• Meaningful equity
• 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
• Stipends for Gender-affirming care
• Unlimited PTO

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed