Forward Deployed Site Reliability Engineer (TS/SCI Required)

About The Company

Twenty Technologies (www.twenty.io) industrializes offensive cyber operations for the U.S. and its allies. Founded in 2024, Twenty has raised $138M from leading investors including Accel, Caffeinated Capital, Friends & Family Capital, Point72 Ventures, General Catalyst, and In-Q-Tel. Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia.

Role Summary

You'll be our eyes, ears, and hands on the ground at a government customer site, ensuring the reliability and performance of Twenty's mission-critical platform running in a restricted, air-gapped AWS environment. This role sits at the intersection of deep technical ownership and customer-facing engineering.

Who You Are

• You own reliability outcomes, not just uptime dashboards — you define what "healthy" means and hold the system to it.
• You're as comfortable writing a runbook as you are deep in a production incident with limited tooling and no safety net.
• You operate well with minimal remote support — ambiguity doesn't paralyze you, and you know when to escalate versus when to solve it yourself.
• You build trust naturally with external stakeholders, including government customers, and can translate complex technical situations into plain language under pressure.
• You treat toil as a bug: if you're doing something manually more than twice, you automate it.
• You communicate with precision — your incident reports and runbooks are read by people who weren't in the room, and they need to be right.
• You understand that in a restricted environment, you are the feedback loop — and you take that responsibility seriously.

What You'll Do

• Reliability Engineering:
• Define, track, and report on SLIs and SLOs for platform services running in the customer environment.
• Use error budgets to drive reliability conversations with the Arlington engineering team, translating operational data into prioritized engineering work.
• Identify and eliminate toil: build automation for repetitive operational tasks within the constraints of the secure environment.
• Conduct post-incident reviews, own root cause analysis, and drive durable fixes in partnership with the engineering team.
• Observability & Incident Response:
• Own the observability posture for the on-site deployment — dashboards, alerting thresholds, and log pipelines using the LGTM stack (Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Mimir).
• Lead incident response on-site: triage, containment, coordination with Arlington, and customer communication.
• Maintain and continuously improve runbooks for operational procedures and emergency response protocols.
• Serve as the on-call anchor for the customer environment, with clear escalation paths to the engineering team.
• Deployment & Infrastructure Operations:
• Work with the customer deployment team to get Twenty's platform stood up and updated within the restricted environment.
• Manage containerized services (Docker, Docker Compose) across deployment lifecycle — configuration, updates, rollbacks.
• Apply and validate Terraform-based infrastructure changes within the enclave, in coordination with the DSO engineer who owns IaC policy and guardrails.
• Perform capacity planning and flag scaling requirements to the Arlington team before they become incidents.
• Customer Liaison & Engineering Feedback:
• Serve as the primary technical interface between the government customer and Twenty's engineering team — translating operational requirements, constraints, and issues in both directions.
• Represent the operational environment accurately in engineering discussions: what the team in Arlington can't see, you make visible.
• Partner with the DevSecOps engineer on compliance, logging, and audit requirements specific to the customer environment.
• Provide technical guidance and support to customer stakeholders on system behavior and troubleshooting procedures.

Must Have

• 5+ years of professional experience in site reliability engineering, production operations, or a closely related infrastructure role.
• Proven experience defining and tracking SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets in a production environment.
• Hands-on experience with Docker, Docker Compose, and AWS (EC2, ECS, RDS, VPCs, security groups) in production deployments.
• Solid Linux/Unix systems administration skills; productive in constrained environments where GUI tooling may be limited or unavailable.
• Experience with Terraform for infrastructure provisioning and configuration, working within DSO-provided policy guardrails.
• Experience with the LGTM observability stack or equivalent (Grafana, Loki, Prometheus/Mimir, distributed tracing).
• Strong incident response experience: you've led responses, written post-mortems and runbooks, and shipped the preventive fix.
• Scripting proficiency in Python or Bash for operational automation, with familiarity in Go a plus; experience with PagerDuty or equivalent on-call tooling.
• Experience working in or directly supporting government or defense environments, including air-gapped or enclave deployments.

Nice To Have

• Experience with NATS or similar pub/sub messaging systems in production.
• Background in cyber operations, intelligence systems, or signals environments.
• AWS certifications (Solutions Architect, SysOps, or DevOps Engineer).
• Security Requirements:
• Must possess and be able to maintain a TS/SCI security clearance with appropriate polygraph.
• U.S. citizenship required.
• Willingness to travel occasionally for customer engagements and operational support.

Benefits

• Health. Medical, dental, and vision plan options.
• Life / AD&D, disability coverage options.
• Paid parental leave for eligible full-time employees.
• Vacation. Paid holidays and flexible PTO.
• Retirement. 401(k) with pre-tax and Roth options. HSA/FSA options, dependent care FSA.

Qualifications

• Experience with NATS or similar pub/sub messaging systems in production.
• Background in cyber operations, intelligence systems, or signals environments.
• AWS certifications (Solutions Architect, SysOps, or DevOps Engineer).
• Security Requirements:
• Must possess and be able to maintain a TS/SCI security clearance with appropriate polygraph.
• U.S. citizenship required.
• Willingness to travel occasionally for customer engagements and operational support.

Pay

TBD

Schedule

TBD