Lead Distributed Systems Engineer

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 Cape runs private cellular networks that operate disconnected for weeks at a time. Getting subscriber state where it needs to be means delivering it to nodes we can't reach, over links we don't control, onto hardware we can't trust. You'll own the architecture and implementation of an edge data distribution system for private 5G bubbles, and lead the team that builds it. The core challenge is synchronizing data from the cloud to the edge reliably, securely, and efficiently. Because we are early in this product's lifecycle and iterating directly with customers, you will have significant autonomy to set the technical direction and shape the product definition. This is a large and high-complexity problem space with a variety of challenges spanning multiple disciplines including distributed systems, security and building out the services that power end user device connectivity. WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON - Architecture and technical direction. The change propagation pipeline, the reconciliation model for nodes returning after long periods offline, the consistency and conflict-resolution semantics, the trust boundaries. You define the guarantees this system commits to, and you're accountable for whether they hold when a node comes back after six weeks with divergent state. - Hands-on engineering. You lead the team and hold a high bar for execution, and you're most likely also rolling up your sleeves to build the hardest parts of the system yourself. - Technical roadmap and prioritization. Maintain a clear view of what the deployments in front of us need while making room for the investments that don't show up in any single customer's requirements but determine what this system can do two years from now. - Team. Recruit, develop, and retain strong distributed systems engineers. Set clear technical standards. Give people the context and the room to do good work. - Cross-functional partnership. Be a credible, honest technical counterpart to product, our forward deployed engineers, and customers. Translate field constraints into what they actually cost. Bring solutions, not just constraints. - Solving customer problems. You'll work directly with customers to understand their mission, ship something, watch how it holds up in their environment, and use what you learn to shape the next version. That includes knowing when the thing being asked for isn't the thing that's needed, and being able to educate the customer on the technical details of the solution. WHAT WE VALUE - Reliability & Durability: Ensure data arrives exactly where it needs to be every time, leveraging an event-driven architecture so - Offline Resiliency: Build services that remain functional and consistent when offline for extended periods of time - Security in Contested Environments: Design systems under the explicit assumption that edge nodes cannot be inherently trusted and may become compromised at any point and design systems with this principle in mind - Connectivity: Build and scale the core telephony services that provide data connectivity to user devices at the edge and in the cloud EXPERIENCE - Distributed systems depth: You've designed and operated distributed systems in production and have real scar tissue around replication, consistency, and partition-related failure modes. You can reason about a system's guarantees precisely rather than by analogy, and you know the difference between a system that works and a system that provably works every time. - Event-driven architecture: Experience with Kafka, SQS, MQTT, RabbitMQ, Flink, or Spark in production. You understand delivery semantics, ordering, and replay well enough to reason about them under adverse conditions rather than happy-path ones. - Correctness under pressure: You've worked in environments where losing data was not an acceptable outcome, and you've been in situations where a customer needed something shipped and the honest answer was that the design wasn't ready. You have a way of thinking about that tradeoff and you can defend your decisions clearly without being defensive about them. - Engineering leadership: You have led engineers as a manager, a tech lead, or both. You can point to specific people you've grown and specific technical bets you owned end to end. - Communication that moves things forward: You can both explain a consistency guarantee to a customer who wants a feature now and an operational reality to an engineer who's optimizing for the wrong constraint. - Experience that’s helpful (though not required) - Building software that runs on customer hardware, on-prem, air-gapped, or in similar disconnected environments - Backend systems serving mobile devices or edge compute at scale - Logical replication, CDC pipelines, or multi-region and active-active database architectures - Radios, telephony, sim cards and modems or an appetite to learn about them - Working with government or defense customers 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 $250,000-$325,000 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 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.