# Forward Deployed Engineer

**Company:** [Cape](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/cape)
**Location:** Washington, DC, New York, NY
**Role:** Solutions Architecture
**Salary:** $175k – $235k/yr
**Experience:** 2+ years
**Skills:** Software Engineering, Networking, System Design, Customer Deployment, Integration Development, Troubleshooting, Prototyping, Technical Communication, Root Cause Analysis, Production Code
**Posted:** 2026-06-09

> Forward Deployed Engineer embedding with federal and enterprise customers to scope, deploy, and support Cape’s privacy-first mobile network products. Writes production code, troubleshoots live issues, and feeds field requirements back into the engineering roadmap.

## Job Description

## 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

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