Senior/Staff Forward Deployed Software Engineer

About the role

Join Twenty as a forward-deployed engineer, operating critical software directly at a government customer site. This generalist role involves extending and maintaining applications used by national security operators in a secure, air-gapped environment. You will be the primary engineering presence on-site, addressing immediate needs and contributing to core product development.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Design and implement customer-specific features, extensions, and integrations for Twenty's applications.
• Collaborate directly with customer users and technical staff to understand requirements and deliver solutions.
• Develop testable, debuggable, and maintainable code that adheres to classified environment security standards.
• Build software extensions for data retrieval, parsing, transformation, and loading new data sources.
• Investigate unfamiliar source systems and data formats, working with customer stakeholders.
• Extend and field-test AI-backed capabilities with guidance from Arlington-based AI engineers.
• Coordinate with the customer's deployment team for software approval and deployment in high-side environments.
• Monitor platform health and data flows using the LGTM stack (Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Mimir) to identify anomalies.
• Diagnose and resolve production issues on-site, escalating to Arlington with clear findings.
• Lead root cause analysis and post-incident reviews, creating runbooks and design changes.
• Participate in an on-call rotation using PagerDuty, which may require on-site presence for off-hours incidents.
• Develop features for Twenty's core product applications during periods of lower customer-driven work.
• Identify and advocate for field-derived patterns that can become platform capabilities.
• Act as a consistent engineering liaison for the government customer, relaying feedback to the Arlington team.
• Share context and coverage with other on-site forward-deployed engineers and analysts.

Requirements

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant ownership of production services or applications.
• Strong generalist programming skills in Go, Python, or TypeScript, producing reliable code for remote teammates.
• Experience building and delivering backend services or full-stack features from design to operation.
• Proven ability to debug production systems, including log analysis, failure tracing, and root-cause identification under pressure.
• Operational fluency with Linux command line, containerized environments (Docker, Docker Compose), and observability tools.
• Demonstrated ability to deliver production work outside a core specialty (e.g., data pipelines, integrations, infrastructure, ML features) with specialist support.
• Experience in a forward-deployed, field engineering, or embedded customer-facing engineering role.
• Experience deploying and operating software in air-gapped, classified, or restricted environments.
• Ability to work independently and exercise sound judgment in decision-making and escalation.
• Ability to work on-site full-time at a government facility in Northern Virginia.
• Travel to Arlington, VA, approximately 4 days per month.
• Active TS/SCI security clearance with full-scope polygraph.
• Must be a U.S. citizen.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience building ETL/ELT pipelines or data integrations (e.g., Airflow, NiFi, AWS Glue), with strong SQL and schema design skills.
• Experience building LLM-backed application features or operating AI/ML systems in production.
• Hands-on experience with observability tooling (e.g., Grafana, Datadog, Splunk).
• Experience with streaming and message queue technologies (e.g., Kafka, NATS, Kinesis, RabbitMQ).
• Background in military, intelligence, or defense contracting environments.

Skills & tools

• Languages: Go, Python, TypeScript
• Cloud: AWS (EC2, ECS, RDS, CloudWatch) in closed enclaves
• Containers: Docker, Docker Compose
• Observability: Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Mimir (LGTM stack)
• Alerting/On-call: PagerDuty
• Messaging: NATS
• Databases: PostgreSQL
• Data integration: Twenty's proprietary data platform

Practical notes

This role requires an active TS/SCI security clearance with full-scope polygraph. Work is performed on-site at a government facility in Northern Virginia, with travel to Twenty's Arlington, VA office typically 4 days per month. System access is restricted, and tooling constraints apply. Benefits include medical, dental, vision, life/AD&D, disability coverage, paid parental leave (12 weeks for birthing, 4 for non-birthing, 6 for adoptive/foster/surrogacy), paid holidays, flexible PTO, and a 401(k) with pre-tax and Roth options, plus HSA/FSA and dependent care FSA. Benefits vary by location, role, and eligibility. Full plan details are provided during the interview and offer process. Due to U.S. government contract and security requirements, this role is limited to U.S. citizens.