Forward Deployed Engineer - Federal

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

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, FDEs 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.

What You'll Work On

Customer Deployment & Delivery

• 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

Prototyping & Engineering

• 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

Bridge Between Customer, Product, and Engineering

• 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

Experience

Required

• 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

• (Bonus Points)

  • 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

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, NY or Arlington, VA is $175k-$235k depending on experience and interview performance and location.

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.

How to apply

Click the link below to apply.

We reserve the right to make use of any unsolicited resumes received from outside recruiting agencies and / or individual recruiters without being responsible for payment of any fees asserted from the use of unsolicited resumes.

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.