# Lead Distributed Systems Engineer at Cape

- Company: Cape
- What the company does: Cape is the AI platform for partnerships, warm intros, and event marketing — built for teams whose revenue runs on relationships. Backed by Pear VC.
- Company website: https://joincape.ai/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Senior
- Location: New York, NY
- Work setup: Remote
- Pay: $250K to $325K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-09-10
- Apply by: 2026-10-25
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cape/7d19a584-40c0-47ea-9729-53a82d70a625
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/cape-lead-distributed-systems-engineer/

## About 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.

## What they're looking for

- 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
- 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

Tags: Engineering