Senior/Staff Forward Deployed Software Engineer - TS/SCI Cleared

Twenty

5d • $192,000 - $455,000 • Onsite

About The Position

This role is for a Senior/Staff Forward Deployed Software Engineer who will be on the ground at a government customer site, serving as a generalist engineering presence for Twenty's mission-critical platform in a restricted, air-gapped environment. Twenty builds software for cyber operations, and the applications extended and operated are used by operators and analysts working against hard national security problems. This is the broadest engineering role at Twenty, requiring the ability to pick up unfamiliar parts of the system, get productive quickly, and produce work that holds up in production. The engineer will be the primary engineering presence in the environment where the software runs, making judgment calls on production issues and escalating to the Arlington-based team when necessary. When customer work is quiet, the role involves building features for Twenty's core product applications, incorporating field learnings directly into the product. The position reports directly to the VP of Engineering and is part of a small forward deployed team, collaborating with on-site colleagues, the Arlington-based product engineering and DevSecOps teams, and the customer's technical staff. This role is ideal for a strong generalist who wants their work in the hands of operators the same day it's built and prefers to own a production system end to end.

Requirements

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, including substantial time owning services or applications running in production.
• Strong generalist programming ability in at least one of Go, Python, or TypeScript, writing code that remote teammates can review, extend, and trust.
• Experience building and shipping backend services or full-stack features end to end: design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operation.
• Experience debugging production systems: reading logs, tracing failures across components, and root-causing issues under time pressure.
• Working operational fluency: Linux command line, containerized environments (Docker, Docker Compose), and enough observability tooling skill to monitor and operate what you ship.
• Demonstrated range: you've delivered production work outside your core specialty, such as data pipelines, integrations, infrastructure, or ML-backed features, and you're comfortable doing so with support from specialists.
• 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, with demonstrated ability to work independently and sound judgment about when to decide and when to escalate.
• Ability to work on-site full-time at a government facility in Northern Virginia, with travel to Arlington, VA (typically 4 days per month).
• Active TS/SCI security clearance with full-scope polygraph.
• Limited to U.S. citizens due to U.S. government contract and security requirements.

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on experience building ETL/ELT pipelines or data integrations (example technologies: Airflow, NiFi, AWS Glue, or equivalent 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 tooling (Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, or similar).
• Experience with streaming and message queue technologies (example technologies: Kafka, NATS, Kinesis, 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 directly with customer users and technical staff to understand needs, then scope and deliver solutions, making pragmatic trade-offs.
• Write code that is testable, debuggable, and maintainable by remote teammates, with a strong emphasis on testing for trust in a restricted environment.
• Write code that meets the security standards of classified environments, including disciplined credential handling and audit-ready practices.
• Build software extensions to retrieve, parse, transform, and load new data sources into Twenty's applications.
• Investigate unfamiliar source systems and data formats, working with customer stakeholders.
• Extend and field-test AI-backed capabilities with guidance from AI engineers, reporting on effectiveness.
• Work with the customer's deployment team to get software approved, deployed, and running in the high-side environment.
• Monitor the health of the platform and its data flows on-site using the LGTM stack.
• Diagnose and resolve production issues on-site, escalating to Arlington with clear findings.
• Drive root cause analysis and post-incident reviews in partnership with the Arlington engineering team.
• Participate in on-call rotation, potentially requiring return to the customer facility for off-hours incident response.
• Build feature capabilities for Twenty's core product applications when customer-driven work is quiet.
• Surface patterns from the field that should become platform capabilities and advocate for them.
• Serve as a consistent engineering presence for the government customer, being professional, reliable, and clear under pressure.
• Relay operational observations, capability gaps, and customer feedback to the Arlington team accurately and promptly.
• Share context and coverage across the on-site team by working alongside other forward deployed engineers and analysts.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision plan options.
• Life / AD&D, disability coverage options.
• 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).
• Paid holidays and flexible PTO.
• 401(k) with pre-tax and Roth options.
• HSA/FSA options, dependent care FSA.

What This Job Offers

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