Senior/Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

Twenty • Fort Meade, MD

3d • $192,000 - $455,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Twenty Technologies is hiring a Senior/Staff Forward Deployed Engineer to serve as its generalist engineering presence at a government customer site in a restricted, air-gapped environment. The role extends and operates Twenty’s mission-critical cyber operations platform, used by government operators and analysts. The engineer will work directly with customer users and technical staff, while collaborating with the Arlington-based product engineering, data engineering, AI engineering, and DevSecOps teams. The position reports directly to the VP of Engineering.

The role spans customer-specific feature development, integrations, data and AI-backed capabilities, deployment coordination, production operations, reliability, and core product engineering. The engineer will investigate ambiguous problems, make sound decisions in an environment with limited tooling and access, and deliver testable, maintainable software that remote colleagues can review and trust. Specialist work such as data and AI engineering is performed with guidance from Arlington-based specialists.

The engineer will monitor and troubleshoot the platform and data flows, participate in an on-call rotation, coordinate deployment and updates with the customer and Arlington engineering, and lead or contribute to root-cause analysis and post-incident reviews. Because the environment is air-gapped, off-hours incident response may require returning to the customer facility rather than accessing systems remotely. When customer work is quiet, the engineer will build core product features and bring lessons from the field back into the platform.

Work is full-time and on-site at a government facility in Northern Virginia, with travel to Twenty’s Arlington, Virginia office typically four days per month. An active TS/SCI clearance with CI polygraph is required. The role is limited to U.S. citizens due to government contract and security requirements.

Requirements

• At least 6 years of professional software engineering experience, including substantial experience owning services or applications running in production.
• Strong generalist programming ability in at least one of Go, Python, or TypeScript, including writing code remote teammates can review, extend, and trust.
• Experience building and shipping backend services or full-stack features end to end, including design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operation.
• Experience debugging production systems by reading logs, tracing failures across components, and finding root causes under time pressure.
• Working operational fluency with the Linux command line, containerized environments such as Docker and Docker Compose, and observability tools sufficient to monitor and operate shipped software.
• Demonstrated production work outside a core specialty, such as data pipelines, integrations, infrastructure, or ML-backed features, and comfort delivering such work with specialist support.
• Experience in a forward deployed, field engineering, or embedded customer-facing engineering role, including deploying and operating software in air-gapped, classified, or otherwise restricted environments; ability to work independently and exercise sound judgment about when to decide and when to escalate.
• Ability to work full-time on-site at a government facility in Northern Virginia and travel to Arlington, Virginia, typically four days per month.
• Active TS/SCI security clearance with CI polygraph.
• U.S. citizenship, as required by government contract and security requirements.

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on experience building ETL/ELT pipelines or data integrations, such as with Airflow, NiFi, AWS Glue, or custom pipeline development, and solid SQL and schema design skills.
• Experience building LLM-backed application features or operating AI/ML systems in production.
• Hands-on experience with observability tools such as Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, or similar.
• Experience with streaming and message queue technologies such as Kafka, NATS, Kinesis, or RabbitMQ.
• Background in a military, intelligence, or defense contracting environment.

Responsibilities

• Design and build features, extensions, and integrations that adapt Twenty’s applications to the customer’s mission, workflows, and environment.
• Work with customer users and technical staff to understand needs, scope work, and make pragmatic trade-offs among speed, robustness, and environmental constraints.
• Write testable, debuggable, maintainable code, with tests that enable remote Arlington engineers to trust changes they cannot run themselves.
• Follow classified-environment security practices, including avoiding hardcoded secrets, handling credentials carefully, and maintaining audit-ready practices.
• Build extensions that retrieve, parse, transform, and load new data sources into Twenty’s applications, collaborating with data engineers as available.
• Investigate unfamiliar source systems and data formats and work with customer stakeholders to understand their semantics, access patterns, and constraints.
• Extend and field-test AI-backed capabilities with guidance from Arlington AI engineers, and communicate how they perform with real data and users.
• Coordinate with the customer’s deployment team to obtain approval and deploy software in the high-side environment, and execute deployments and updates with Arlington engineering.
• Monitor platform and data-flow health on-site using the LGTM stack and identify anomalies and degradation before they become incidents.
• Diagnose and resolve production issues on-site, escalating to Arlington with a clear account of findings.
• Drive root-cause analysis and post-incident reviews with Arlington engineering, and turn findings into runbooks, fixes, or upstream design changes.
• Participate in the PagerDuty on-call rotation and follow escalation paths; respond to incidents that may require returning to the customer facility.
• Build features for Twenty’s core product applications alongside Arlington product engineering when customer-driven work is quiet.
• Identify field patterns that should become platform capabilities and advocate for them with the product engineering team.
• Serve as a consistent, professional engineering presence for the government customer.
• Relay operational observations, capability gaps, and customer feedback accurately and promptly to the Arlington team.
• Work with other forward deployed engineers and analysts, sharing context and coverage across the on-site team.
• Create and update runbooks and documentation for owned components, and communicate proactively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision plan options.
• Life and AD&D coverage and disability coverage options.
• Paid parental leave for eligible full-time employees: 12 weeks for birthing parents, 4 weeks for non-birthing parents, and 6 weeks for adoptive, foster, or intended parents through surrogacy.
• Paid holidays and flexible PTO.
• 401(k) with pre-tax and Roth options.
• HSA/FSA options, including dependent care FSA.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed