Staff Data Engineer

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, Twenty is dedicated to ensuring American and allied primacy in cyberspace.

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.
• 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 ability to meet the role’s security requirements.

Nice To Have

• Experience with key-value datastores.
• Worked with streaming and message queue systems.
• Experience with graph database technologies.
• Worked with internet/networking datasets (e.g., scan data, DNS, netflow, certificates).
• Worked with analysts or operational users with high-stakes data needs.

Tech Environment

• 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.
• 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.

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, consistent with applicable law.