Software Engineer, Product Platform

Cape; Arlington (VA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) match

Medical, dental, vision coverage

Parental leave

Job summary

Cape is hiring for a Senior/Staff backend engineer to drive foundational services like Identity, Billing, and Provisioning. You will collaborate with Product, Mobile, and SRE to enable new features and own cross-component architectures. The role emphasizes solving privacy-focused, scalable systems with low downtime and thoughtful design.

You will lead end-to-end design, migrations, and implementation, balancing fast delivery with long-term maintainability in a flat team structure.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience building and operating scalable backend systems.
• Proficiency in Go and distributed systems design.
• Experience leading a significant re-architecture or migration on a live system.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture across multiple foundational components end to end.
• Re-architect services for maintainability and scalability as we grow.
• Collaborate with Product, Mobile, SRE and Design to shape infrastructure.

Skills

Backend systems

Go

Distributed systems

APIs

Leadership

Tools

PostgreSQL

Redis

CI/CD

Job description

About Cape

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.

About Cape

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.

The Team

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. Our structure is flat, and collaboration matters more than hierarchy. 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.

The Role:

The Product Platform team owns the foundational services that power Cape: Identity & Access, Subscriber Lifecycle, Provisioning, Billing, Reporting, Spam Protection, and Voicemail. You will work closely with Product, Mobile, and SRE teams to enable new features, and you will own features that span multiple foundational components end to end. We’re hiring engineers who are passionate about solving real-world problems, personal privacy, and empowering peers to be autonomous. Our team needs experienced engineers who have strong distributed systems backgrounds to help us re-architect these systems as we scale into our next phase. This includes re-organizing services for maintainability and extensibility as we grow in features and people, and adopting the right service infrastructure (workflow orchestration, service tooling, CI/CD) and data infrastructure (Postgres, Redis, streaming materialized views, data lake). Your day-to-day will constantly change and be filled with ambiguity, but everything you work on has a high impact. Cape is a flat organization and we don't have formal levels. For calibration: this is a Senior/Staff scope role - you'll own architecture across systems and make decisions that stick.

Ways You'll Make an Impact

• Enable Scale: Build reliable, extensible systems that let us grow in features, users, and engineers including re-architecting existing services and migrating live flows onto new systems safely.


• Own the Lifecycle: Take full ownership of features that span multiple foundational components from problem discovery through design, deployment, and operations.


• Raise the Bar: Make safe change the default - end-to-end testing, continuous deployment, zero-downtime migrations, and hold a high standard through design and code review.


• Collaborate: Work closely with Product, Mobile, SRE, and Design to shape features and the infrastructure they run on, bringing stakeholders along through clear written proposals.


• Mentor: Grow the engineers around you through pairing, review, and written designs, transferring ownership of what you build.

What We Value

• Autonomy: A proven ability to learn continuously, work independently, and make decisions with minimal supervision.


• Partnership: Experience brainstorming and iterating alongside product managers and designers.


• Pragmatism: The ability to move quickly while building for the long term. You take a thoughtful, practical approach to solving complex problems, considering tradeoffs and avoiding over-engineering.


• Adaptability: Comfort working in a constantly evolving environment with dynamic objectives and direct user iteration.


• Communication: The ability to work collaboratively with both technical and non-technical teammates, understanding how technical decisions impact the end user.


• Mission-Driven: A deep‑seeded belief in the importance of digital privacy and security. You understand that the code we ship has real-world consequences and are driven to build systems that protect and empower users.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience building and operating scalable backend systems in one or more modern languages (we're primarily a Go shop).


• A strong foundation in Computer Science - algorithms, data structures, and distributed systems demonstrated through the systems you've built.


• Hands‑on distributed systems experience: you've designed and operated services that communicate through queues and async workflows, and you know idempotency, retries, and schema migrations from production experience.


• Experience leading a significant re-architecture or migration on a live system, end to end.


• Strong written and verbal communication skills - you work through designs and decisions in writing and bring others along.

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 NYC is $200K - $290K depending on level, 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.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or national origin, and without regard to disability or status as a protected veteran, or any other status protected by law.