Principal Engineer & CMS Platform Lead

About Kape Technologies

Kape (LSE: KAPE, privatized 2023) is a global leader in the "Privacy-First" digital security era. We are the powerhouse behind the world’s most trusted consumer privacy brands. With over 7 million paying subscribers and a global team of 1,000+ experts across 10 locations, our mission is to provide complete digital autonomy. We believe that a free and open internet starts with state-of-the-art technology. As we scale toward the next 10 million users, we are consolidating our web infrastructure into a unified, next-generation content platform that matches the world-class engineering of our core VPN products.

The Challenge

You will lead the engineering squad responsible for retiring our legacy WordPress instances across brands. You aren't just building a website; you are building a Content Operating System powered by an open-source headless CMS at its core. This platform must support high-velocity PPC landing pages, complex multi-language blogs, and technical support hubs—all while maintaining the extreme performance and security standards expected of global privacy leaders.

A key part of this role is evaluating and adopting an open-source CMS solution (such as Strapi, Payload CMS, Directus, or KeystoneJS) as the foundation of the new platform. You will assess these solutions against our requirements for extensibility, multi-tenancy, and API-first content delivery, and lead the customization and integration effort to make the chosen platform fit our multi-brand ecosystem.

Key Responsibilities

• Open-Source CMS Selection & Integration: Evaluate and lead the adoption of an open-source headless CMS (e.g., Strapi, Payload CMS, Directus, KeystoneJS) as the content backbone. Define selection criteria around extensibility, plugin ecosystem, multi-tenancy support, role-based access, and API performance. Own the customization roadmap to tailor the chosen solution to our multi-brand needs.
• Unified Architecture: Design a multi-brand, component-based headless system built on the selected open-source CMS. You will architect the "Core Engine" that allows all three brands to share high-performance components while maintaining unique visual identities.
• Inheritance & Customization: Solve the "Parent-Child" challenge. Build a system where a global campaign (Parent) can be instantly deployed across dozens of regional versions (Children) with localized overrides and inherited SEO logic.
• Infrastructure & Security Governance: Partner with DevOps to define the global delivery strategy. You will oversee requirements for Edge Computing (ISR/Edge Functions), WAF, and multi-layered caching (Redis/CDN) to ensure sub-second LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) globally.
• AI-Powered Localization: Architect a native-feeling translation pipeline. Integrate LLMs to handle context-aware translations and build an AI "Quality Gate" that automatically checks pages for SEO health and UI regressions before they go live.
• Visual Editor Implementation: Bridge the gap between engineering and marketing by leveraging the chosen open-source CMS's admin panel and extending it with a high-performance visual editing experience that doesn't bloat the frontend code.

Technical Requirements (Hard Skills)

• Next.js & React Mastery: Expert-level experience