Staff / Principal Backend Software Engineer

About The Company

Twenty Technologies, founded in 2024, industrializes offensive cyber operations for the U.S. and its allies. Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, Twenty has raised $138M from prominent investors including Accel, Caffeinated Capital, Friends & Family Capital, Point72 Ventures, General Catalyst, and In-Q-Tel. Twenty’s mission is to ensure American and allied primacy in cyberspace.

Role Summary

You’ll design and build backend systems that transform real-time operational data into mission-critical capabilities. This role involves owning core services that must be fast, reliable, and secure, operating across cloud and on-prem environments. You’ll make high-leverage architecture decisions, drive technical execution, and mentor engineers to raise the bar on engineering excellence.

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.
• Strong communication skills and ability to align teams around clear technical decisions.
• Strong track record mentoring engineers through code reviews, technical guidance, and feedback.

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

• 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

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.

Compensation Range

$192K - $455K