Forward Deployed Engineer (East Asia)

Cape; United States; Remote; USD 85,000 - 115,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Paid paternity leave

Medical insurance

401(k)

Paid maternity leave

Dental insurance

Disability insurance

Commuter benefits

Vision insurance

Job summary

Cape is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to engage with federal customers, deliver technical solutions, and troubleshoot field operations. This role requires technical expertise and strong customer interaction skills, ensuring that Cape’s products meet mission requirements effectively.

The ideal candidate will have at least 2 years of relevant experience, an active TS/SCI clearance, and demonstrate strong problem-solving abilities. Relocation to the Asia-Pacific region is expected.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated ability to scope ambiguous problems and prioritize effectively.
• Strong resourcefulness and ownership attitude.
• Experience with mobile networks or cybersecurity.

Responsibilities

• Ensure Cape’s products work in the field for federal customers.
• Translate mission needs into working software and deliver outcomes.
• Scope deployments and troubleshoot live production issues.

Skills

Technical competency in multiple domains

Excellent communication

Ability to engage with customers

Hands-on experience

Fluency in Mandarin Chinese

Education

2+ years of experience in software engineering

Active TS/SCI clearance

U.S. citizenship and eligibility for Top Secret clearance

Job description

Job Responsibilities

• Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) are the technical operators who ensure Cape’s products actually work in the field for the customers who depend on them most
• In a world of demo-ware and big promises, an FDE delivers tangible outcomes: they embed with federal customers, translate ambiguous mission needs into working software, and feed hard-won demand signal back into product and engineering
• This is a hands‑on builder role at the seam between Business Development and Engineering. You will be the customer’s technical advocate inside Cape and Cape’s technical advocate inside the customer’s building
• You will scope deployments, prototype integrations, troubleshoot live issues on production networks, and pull engineering priorities directly from operator pain. Where the product doesn’t yet do what the mission requires, you will build the bridge—and then push the durable fix into the roadmap
• FDE is a small, high‑trust team. We’re building this together. You will not be handed a playbook, you’ll help write it
• Own the technical delivery of Cape’s products into federal/national security/enterprise 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; then work alongside the broader engineering team to build the features that address them; 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
• Embed with the broader engineering team to design and ship customer‑specific features

Benefits

• Paid paternity leave
• Medical insurance
• 401(k)
• Paid maternity leave
• Dental insurance
• Disability insurance
• Commuter benefits
• Vision insurance

Qualifications

• Demonstrated ability to engage directly with customers to scope technical requirements and deliver against them end to end
• 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
• 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
• Strong ability to scope ambiguous problems, sequence delivery, and make sound prioritization calls without explicit instruction
• Based in Washington, DC or New York to start, with an expected relocation to Asia‑Pacific, or already located in the Asia‑Pacific region
• 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
• 2+ years of experience in a software engineering or forward deployed engineering role
• 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
• Active TS/SCI clearance
• Fluency in Mandarin Chinese (spoken and written)
• 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