Forward Deployed Engineer

What You Will Do

Customer Deployment & Delivery

• Own the technical delivery of Cape’s products into federal/national security/enterprise 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; then work alongside the broader engineering team to build the features that address them; 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
• Embed with the broader engineering team to design and ship customer-specific features

What You Bring

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
• Based in Washington, DC or New York to start, with an expected relocation to Asia-Pacific, or already located in the Asia-Pacific region

Preferred

• Active TS/SCI clearance
• Fluency in Mandarin Chinese (spoken and written)
• 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 & Benefits

• Competitive compensation that is geo-adjusted based on your location, along with meaningful equity
• Salary range for this role in NYC/DC is $175k-$235k depending on experience and interview performance and location
• 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
• Relocation and moving assistance if needed