Software Engineer, Developer Experience

Developer Experience Engineer

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.

Developer Tooling and Environments

• 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
• 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

AI Tooling and AI-Assisted Development

• 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

Engineering Culture and Standards

• 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

Required

• 4+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful time spent on internal platforms, developer tooling, or infrastructure
• A track record of identifying developer friction, building solutions, and measuring the improvement — not just shipping tooling
• Fluency in at least one modern backend language — Go is strongly preferred; Python, TypeScript, or Rust also welcome
• Hands-on experience improving and optimizing CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions, Buildkite, Bazel, or similar) at engineering-team scale
• Strong understanding of containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, or other containers.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills — you can explain infrastructure tradeoffs to engineers who didn't ask for a lecture and write docs that actually get read

Nice to Have

• Experience building developer platforms in security-constrained environments (FedRAMP, DISA STIGs, or government compliance frameworks)
• Familiarity with software supply chain security: artifact signing (Sigstore, Cosign), SBOM generation, dependency auditing
• Experience at a high-growth startup where the engineering team scaled rapidly and tooling had to keep pace
• Background in observability tooling: distributed tracing, metrics pipelines, and making complex systems legible to engineers
• Experience integrating AI coding assistants (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) into engineering workflows, including prompt tuning, context management, and measuring productivity impact
• Active U.S. security clearance or eligibility and willingness to obtain one

Compensation

We offer competitive compensation that is geo-adjusted based on your location, along with meaningful equity so you share in the value you help create. Salary range for this role in New York, New York is $225,000-$275,000 depending on experience and interview performance.

Our benefits include:

• 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
  • Gender-affirming care
• Unlimited PTO

Our Culture & Values

• We hire excellent people, give them outsized responsibility, and trust them to execute. Every person at Cape has a proven track record of tackling hard problems and winning.
• We believe that personal privacy and national security are not at odds, and that they can be reconciled through strong technology.
• We believe companies exist to build awesome things and take care of the people who build them, so we offer top-tier healthcare, 401(k) matching, and a generous vacation policy that our team actually uses to recharge.
• We believe that a stronger company and a better product are built by people from all walks of life. We hire without regard to race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, disability, or Veteran status. If you are great at what you do, you belong here.