Engineering Lead (manager) - Platform

Lead Software Engineer

Cape is hiring a Lead Software Engineer to manage backend engineering teams building distributed, cloud-native & on-prem systems and user-facing product features. You'll lead a team that includes first-time managers, drive the technical and people strategy, and work closely with Product and Design to ship scalable, reliable features that move the business forward. We're looking for a builder, mentor, and leader who thrives on developing technical talent and delivering high-quality systems at scale. This role reports to our founding engineer and Head of Engineering, Stephen Dowhy.

Outcomes (What You Will Do In This Role)

Technical Leadership: Scope problems, provide technical mentorship, craft architecture, review technical designs, and manage technical execution to deliver solutions to problems on relevant timelines.

Career & Personal Development: Manage and mentor teams of engineers and emerging managers. Provide coaching, structured feedback, and career development paths for engineers across all levels of experience.

Product Design & Delivery: Generate ideas, architecture, and execute on net new products & features to drive business direction and growth.

Distributed Systems Ownership: Ensure that distributed services are designed and built with reliability, observability, and security in mind, aligned with Cape's standards for performance and scalability across both on-prem and cloud.

Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with other Engineering Leads, Product Managers, Designers, and Business Development to define scope, prioritize work, and ensure end-to-end delivery of product initiatives.

Culture Building: Foster an environment of trust, respect, collaboration, learning, and continuous improvement across your teams.

Hiring & Scaling: Drive hiring for your teams, working closely with Talent and Engineering Leadership to attract, assess, and retain top technical talent.

Process Evolution: Champion engineering best practices for feature development, code review, deployment, incident response, and technical documentation.

Competencies

Engineering Management: 3+ years experience leading software engineering teams, including managing managers. Skilled at developing engineers and managers through coaching, mentorship, and performance management.

Backend & Distributed Systems Expertise: Deep experience building, deploying, and maintaining microservices in production, with strong knowledge of distributed systems design, cloud-native architectures (AWS, Azure, or GCP), and scalable API development.

Product Feature Delivery: Proven success in leading teams that have shipped complex, end-to-end product features that created measurable user or business impact.

Strategic & Hands-On: Able to zoom between high-level technical direction and tactical problem-solving to support teams and unblock delivery.

Cross-Functional Partnership: Effective working closely with Product, Design, Security, and other Engineering Leads to align technical execution with product strategy.

Technical Talent Developer: Passionate about growing technical talent at all stages—from junior engineers to new managers—through mentorship, sponsorship, and structured development.

Operational Excellence: Deep commitment to support, observability, and incident response best practices.

Communication & Influence: Strong communicator who can clearly articulate technical and strategic decisions to engineers, peers, and executives alike.

Outcome Oriented: Get things done. Not every solution needs to be perfect or exquisite. The best solutions are the ones that work and solve the problem on the necessary timelines.

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. 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
• Unlimited PTO

We are builders, and we choose to spend our time building things that matter. Many of our people have backgrounds in Defense Tech as well as the defense and intelligence community. We build to win.

We hire excellent people, give them outsized responsibility, and trust them to execute at a high level. Everyone here has a track record of solving hard problems throughout their careers.

We believe that personal privacy and national security interests are not inherently at odds, and can be reconciled via strong technology.

We believe that companies exist to build awesome things and take care of their people. Our benefits reflect that– top-tier health care, 401(k) matching, and a generous vacation policy (that we actually use).

We hire candidates of any race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital or family status, disability, Veteran status, and any other status. Achieving diversity across these categories will serve to make our company stronger and our product better.