Staff Data Engineer
About the Company
Twenty Technologies, founded in 2024, industrializes offensive cyber operations for the U.S. and its allies. Based in Arlington, Virginia, Twenty has raised $138M from leading investors.
Role Summary
You will own the data infrastructure that powers Twenty’s cyber operations applications and capabilities. This role involves building a durable, high-performance data lake and the pipelines, schemas, and query patterns that make petabyte-scale datasets usable and economical. You’ll partner closely with engineers and intelligence analysts to transform messy, high-volume operational data into reliable, well-modeled systems that drive real missions. You’ll also lead technical initiatives and mentor other engineers as we scale what we can support and ship.
Who You Are
- Think in systems: data modeling, storage formats, compute engines, and access patterns all have to fit together.
- Opinionated about schema and index design, and you can explain tradeoffs clearly.
- Default to measurable reliability: data quality, lineage, repeatability, and operational excellence.
- Comfortable working with ambiguous datasets and evolving requirements without lowering standards.
- Collaborate tightly across roles, especially with engineers and analysts who need fast, correct answers.
- Take leadership seriously—mentoring others, raising the bar, and driving initiatives to completion.
- Motivated by national security outcomes and want your work to matter in the real world.
What You'll Do
- Lead the development and operation of a data lake for cyber operations and intelligence data.
- Design schemas, partitions, and indexes that make complex datasets performant and cost-effective to query.
- Partner with engineers and intelligence analysts to define query patterns and data products for mission use cases.
- Build and evolve ETL pipelines that are observable, recoverable, and resilient to upstream change.
- Drive technical initiatives end-to-end, from architecture decisions through production rollout and iteration.
- Establish best practices for data quality, documentation, and operational ownership across the platform.
- Mentor engineers on data modeling, performance tuning, and production-grade pipeline design.
- Identify bottlenecks in storage/compute/query layers and ship improvements with clear performance wins.
Must Have
- 8+ years of experience in data engineering and/or data architecture.
- Mastery-level expertise building ETL pipelines and operating them in production.
- Deep experience with data lake architecture and systems used to query data lakes.
- Strong schema and index design skills, including partitioning, indexing, and clustering strategies.
- Experience with column-oriented databases in production environments.
- Built data systems from scratch (not just maintained existing platforms).
- Proven leadership experience mentoring engineers and driving technical initiatives.
- U.S. citizenship and meeting the role’s security requirements.
Nice To Have
- Experience with key-value datastores.
- Experience with streaming and message queue systems.
- Experience with graph database technologies.
- Experience supporting analysts or operational users with high-stakes data needs.
Tech Environment (You Might Work With)
- Data lakes: Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Apache Hive
- Query engines: Trino, Presto, AWS Athena, Apache Spark
- Column stores: ClickHouse, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery
- ETL / orchestration: Airflow, AWS Glue, NiFi, ClickPipe
- Streaming / queues: Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS, AWS Kinesis
- Graph: Neo4j, AWS Neptune, Memgraph, Apache AGE
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.
Benefits Vary by Location, Role, and Eligibility
Full plan details provided during the interview and offer process.
Qualifications
- You have 8+ years of experience in data engineering and/or data architecture.
- You have mastery-level expertise building ETL pipelines and operating them in production.
- You have deep experience with data lake architecture and systems used to query data lakes.
- You have strong schema and index design skills, including partitioning, indexing, and clustering strategies.
- You have experience with column-oriented databases in production environments.
- You have built data systems from scratch (not just maintained existing platforms).
- You have proven leadership experience mentoring engineers and driving technical initiatives.
- You are a U.S. citizen and can meet the role’s security requirements.
Pay
Details TBD
Schedule
Details TBD