Senior Software Engineer, Developer Experience

Cape•New York, NY

About The Position

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. 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.

Requirements

Proven track record of tackling hard problems and winning
Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines
Experience with developer tooling and environments
Experience with AI-assisted development strategies and tools
Understanding of security and compliance constraints, including FedRAMP-adjacent controls
Experience with secrets handling, artifact signing, dependency provenance, and supply chain integrity
Experience with reliability and operational health of internal developer platforms
Ability to identify and eliminate friction across engineering organizations
Contribution to engineering standards around testing, code review, and deployment practices

Nice To Haves

Experience with containerized setups
Experience with prompt engineering for internal tooling
Experience with retrieval-augmented generation over internal docs
Experience with repository-aware configurations

Responsibilities

Own and continuously improve Cape's continuous integration and deployment pipelines — build times, flakiness rates, parallelism, caching, and test isolation are your KPIs
Design and implement infrastructure that enables engineers to go from code to deployed artifact quickly and with high confidence, regardless of which product surface they're working on
Drive reliability improvements that eliminate common failure modes: flaky tests, non-reproducible builds, slow pipelines, and environment drift between local and CI
Instrument and measure the development pipeline end-to-end — establish baselines, track trends, and surface bottlenecks before engineers have to ask
Build and maintain the internal tooling, scripts, and SDKs that Cape engineers use daily — from project scaffolding and local dev setup to testing utilities and debugging aids
Own the local development environment story: containerized setups, secrets management, service dependencies, and onboarding time for new engineers
Evaluate and introduce new tools thoughtfully - instrument adoption, gather feedback, and deprecate what isn't working
Write the documentation and runbooks that make complex infrastructure accessible to engineers who shouldn't need to become infrastructure experts to use it
Own Cape’s AI-assisted development strategy - evaluate, integrate, and configure AI coding tools (code completion, automated review, agentic coding assistants) so engineers get high-quality suggestions that respect our security and compliance requirements
Build guardrails and context systems that make AI tools effective in Cape’s codebase - prompt engineering for internal tooling, retrieval-augmented generation over internal docs, and repository-aware configurations that keep AI suggestions relevant and safe
Measure the productivity impact of AI tooling rigorously - track adoption, code acceptance rates, time savings, and quality metrics to separate hype from genuine acceleration
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 avoid
Build developer tooling within Cape's security and compliance constraints — our government customers require FedRAMP-adjacent controls, and developer workflows must be designed with that reality in mind from the start
Partner with security engineering to ensure that developer tooling doesn't become an attack surface — secrets handling, artifact signing, dependency provenance, and supply chain integrity are first-class concerns
Own the reliability and operational health of internal developer platforms — treat them like production systems, because to the engineers depending on them, they are
Identify patterns of friction across the engineering organization through observation, surveys, and direct partnership with teams - then prioritize and eliminate them
Contribute to engineering standards around testing, code review, and deployment practices that help Cape's engineers ship with speed and confidence
Set a high bar for the developer experience through your own work - write code that other engineers will be glad to depend on