Staff Backend Engineer

About the role

You'll design and build backend systems that turn real-time operational data into mission-critical capabilities. This role owns core services that need to be fast, reliable, and secure—operating across cloud and on-prem environments. You'll make high-leverage architecture decisions, drive technical execution, and raise the bar through mentorship and engineering standards. You'll partner closely with product, operations, and frontend teams to ship systems that work under real-world constraints.

Who You Are

• Motivated by high-stakes, real-world outcomes—especially in national security and cyber operations.
• Takes ownership: pushes projects from ambiguous problem to shipped, measured capability.
• Brings calm, high-judgment leadership during incidents, tradeoff discussions, and tight timelines.
• Holds a high bar for reliability, security, and maintainability—and helps others meet it.
• Communicates clearly with both technical and non-technical partners.
• Prefers simple, scalable designs and knows when complexity is justified.
• Enjoys mentoring and leveling up engineers through feedback, pairing, and strong technical direction.

What You'll Do

• Architect and build high-throughput backend services that process real-time operational data.
• Lead technical design reviews and choose pragmatic approaches for new features and system improvements.
• Design event-driven and distributed systems that are resilient, observable, and performance-tuned.
• Define stable APIs for internal and external consumers, partnering with frontend for seamless integration.
• Improve engineering excellence through code reviews, standards, testing strategy, and incident practices.
• Build and maintain CI/CD workflows that enable rapid, secure delivery.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues, lead incident response, and drive durable fixes.
• Partner with product and operational stakeholders to translate needs into deliverable technical plans.
• Contribute to technical strategy and roadmap planning across backend services.
• Support hiring by participating in interviews and helping define what "great" looks like.

Must Have

• 10+ years building scalable backend systems in production environments.
• 4+ years of experience in Golang, or 4+ years writing server-side business logic in an object-oriented language (Java, Kotlin, C#, Python) or systems language (C, C++, Rust) with strong system design aptitude.
• Led technical initiatives end-to-end, including architecture, execution, and delivery.
• Experience designing distributed systems (e.g., event-driven architectures, messaging, consistency tradeoffs).
• Built cloud-native services and operated them in production (AWS preferred).
• Strong security fundamentals: secure coding, threat modeling, and defensible design choices.
• Track record mentoring engineers through code reviews, technical guidance, and feedback.
• Strong communication skills and can align teams around clear technical decisions.

Nice To Have

• Experience designing data models and queries in graph databases (e.g., Neo4j, AWS Neptune).
• Used relational databases (ex: Postgres, MySQL, or MariaDB) to solve business problems and are able to reason about query performance.
• Worked on defense, intelligence, or security-focused products with real operational users.
• Shipped large-scale data processing systems (streaming, near-real-time analytics, or similar).
• Integrated ML/AI capabilities into production systems in a practical, measurable way.
• Open-source contributions or personal projects that demonstrate strong engineering craft.

Tech Environment (You Might Work With)

• Go (Golang) business logic
• AWS and hybrid cloud/on-prem deployments
• Event-driven messaging (e.g., NATS)
• Containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
• GraphQL and service-to-service APIs
• Graph databases (Neo4j, AWS Neptune) and complex relationship data

Security / Work Environment

This role requires eligibility to obtain and maintain a U.S. Government security clearance. This role may involve work in a controlled environment.

Benefits

• Health. Medical, dental, and vision plan options. Life / AD&D, disability coverage options.
• Family. Paid parental leave for eligible full-time employees. 12 weeks for birthing parents, 4 for non-birthing parents, 6 weeks for adoptive, foster, or intended parents through surrogacy.
• Vacation. Paid holidays and flexible PTO. Take what you need.
• Retirement. 401(k) with pre-tax and Roth options. HSA/FSA options, dependent care FSA.
• At the office. Commuter benefits. On-site garage parking. Bike storage. Building fitness center. Desk setup stipend.

Additional Information

• Some positions may require eligibility to obtain a U.S. Government security clearance.
• Twenty is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, veteran status, disability, or any other protected status.
• If you need a reasonable accommodation during the hiring process, let us know and we will work with you.
• hackajob is partnering with Twenty to fill this position. Create a profile to be automatically considered for this role—and others that match your experience.
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