Cape
Cape
Cape is a telecommunications company building a privacy-first mobile network for more secure, trustworthy communication. Its services are designed to give users greater privacy while using mobile connectivity, addressing growing concerns about how personal information is handled in modern communications.

Lead Distributed Systems Engineer (Hybrid)

Lead the architecture and development of secure, resilient distributed systems for Cape’s private 5G networks. Build data synchronization, edge connectivity, and telephony services that remain reliable across offline and untrusted environments.

Description

  • Own the architecture and delivery of edge data distribution systems for private 5G networks
  • Lead development of the distributed data synchronization platform
  • Define change propagation, reconciliation, consistency, conflict resolution, and trust-boundary models
  • Establish system guarantees and verify them after nodes recover from extended offline periods
  • Implement and operate the system’s most complex components
  • Maintain the technical roadmap while balancing deployment priorities with long-term investments
  • Recruit, develop, and retain distributed systems engineers
  • Establish clear engineering standards
  • Collaborate with product, forward-deployed engineers, and customers
  • Convert field constraints into technical and product requirements
  • Work with customers to understand missions, deliver solutions, assess performance in their environments, and guide future iterations
  • Develop durable, event-driven services that stay functional and consistent while offline
  • Design systems that account for compromised or untrusted edge nodes
  • Build and scale core telephony services that provide data connectivity to devices across edge and cloud environments

Requirements

  • Experience designing and operating distributed systems in production
  • Production experience with Kafka, SQS, MQTT, RabbitMQ, Flink, or Spark
  • Understanding of delivery semantics, ordering, and replay
  • Experience building systems where data loss was unacceptable
  • Engineering leadership experience as a manager, technical lead, or both
  • Ability to reason precisely about replication, consistency, partition failures, and system guarantees
  • Experience developing software for customer hardware, on-premises, air-gapped, or disconnected environments is helpful but not required
  • Experience with backend systems serving mobile devices or edge computing at scale is helpful but not required
  • Experience with logical replication, CDC pipelines, or multi-region and active-active database architectures is helpful but not required
  • Experience with radios, telephony, SIM cards, and modems—or willingness to learn—is helpful but not required
  • Experience working with government or defense customers is helpful but not required
  • Ability to work hybrid from the New York, NY, or Arlington, VA, office three days per week
  • United States work authorization

Benefits

  • Meaningful equity
  • 401(k) match
  • Full medical, dental, and vision premium coverage for you and your dependents
  • Twelve weeks of paid parental leave for all parents with no waiting period
  • Stipends for family-forming needs
  • Stipends for gender-affirming care
  • Generous vacation policy

Related Jobs

Capital One

AI Engineer 5, Agentic AI and Generative AI Platform Services at Capital One

Capital One

Build scalable agentic and generative AI platforms for Capital One’s banking systems. Focus on foundation models, inference, orchestration, governance, and production AI infrastructure.

Open