Original listing text, shown exactly as published by the company.
The Role
Cape's engineering team is small by design and ambitious by nature. We build cryptographic primitives, 5G core network functions, zero-trust edge systems, and threat detection pipelines - problems that don't have StackOverflow answers. The people doing that work deserve an environment that gets out of their way.
As a Developer Experience Engineer, your job is to make Cape's engineers measurably faster, less frustrated, and more confident in what they ship. That means owning the internal platforms, tooling, and workflows that engineering depends on — from CI/CD pipelines and local development environments to AI-assisted development workflows, test infrastructure, and release processes. This is not a support role. It is a product role where the customer is the engineering organization, the product is the development loop, and quality is measured in time-to-merge, build reliability, AI-augmented velocity, and the number of times an engineer has to context-switch to deal with infrastructure instead of product.
You will work across the full engineering organization — embedded closely with platform, product, and security teams — and report to engineering leadership. Your impact will be felt by every engineer at Cape.
What You'll Own
CI/CD and Build Infrastructure
- Own and continuously improve Cape's continuous integration and deployment pipelines — build times, flakiness rates, parallelism, caching, and test isolation are your KPIs
- Design and implement infrastructure that enables engineers to go from code to deployed artifact quickly and with high confidence, regardless of which product surface they're working on
- Drive reliability improvements that eliminate common failure modes: flaky tests, non-reproducible builds, slow pipelines, and environment drift between local and CI
- Instrument and measure the development pipeline end-to-end — establish baselines, track trends, and surface bottlenecks before engineers have to ask
Developer Tooling and Environments
- Build and maintain the internal tooling, scripts, and SDKs that Cape engineers use daily — from project scaffolding and local dev setup to testing utilities and debugging aids
- Own the local development environment story: containerized setups, secrets management, service dependencies, and onboarding time for new engineers
- Evaluate and introduce new tools thoughtfully - instrument adoption, gather feedback, and deprecate what isn't working
- Write the documentation and runbooks that make complex infrastructure accessible to engineers who shouldn't need to become infrastructure experts to use it
AI Tooling and AI-Assisted Development
- Own Cape’s AI-assisted development strategy - evaluate, integrate, and configure AI coding tools (code completion, automated review, agentic coding assistants) so engineers get high-quality suggestions that respect our security and compliance requirements
- Build guardrails and context systems that make AI tools effective in Cape’s codebase - prompt engineering for internal tooling, retrieval-augmented generation over internal docs, and repository-aware configurations that keep AI suggestions relevant and safe
- Measure the productivity impact of AI tooling rigorously - track adoption, code acceptance rates, time savings, and quality metrics to separate hype from genuine acceleration
- Stay ahead of the rapidly evolving AI development tooling landscape and bring informed recommendations to engineering leadership on what to adopt, what to build internally, and what to avoid
Platform Reliability and Security Constraints
- Build developer tooling within Cape's security and compliance constraints — our government customers require FedRAMP-adjacent controls, and developer workflows must be designed with that reality in mind from the start
- Partner with security engineering to ensure that developer tooling doesn't become an attack surface — secrets handling, artifact signing, dependency provenance, and supply chain integrity are first-class concerns
- Own the reliability and operational health of internal developer platforms — treat them like production systems, because to the engineers depending on them, they are
Engineering Culture and Standards
- Identify patterns of friction across the engineering organization through observation, surveys, and direct partnership with teams - then prioritize and eliminate them
- Contribute to engineering standards around testing, code review, and deployment practices that help Cape's engineers ship with speed and confidence
- Set a high bar for the developer experience through your own work - write code that other engineers will be glad to depend on
