Staff Data Engineer - TS/SCI Cleared

Design and build software extensions that retrieve, parse, transform, and load new data sources into Twenty's applications.

Investigate unfamiliar source systems and data formats, working with customer stakeholders to understand semantics, access patterns, and constraints before writing code.

Design schemas and data models that fit the platform's performance characteristics and the shape of the data.

Write code that is testable, debuggable, and maintainable by engineers who can't access the environment it runs in. Tests carry unusual weight here: they're how Arlington trusts a change they'll never see run.

Write integration code that meets the security standards of classified environments: no hardcoded secrets, disciplined credential handling, and audit-ready practices throughout, so your work moves through the customer's approval process without friction.

Work with the customer's deployment team to get extensions approved, deployed, and running in the high-side environment.

Work across low-side and high-side environments as customer policy allows, shepherding code through the customer's approval and deployment process into production.

Execute deployments and updates of data integration components in coordination with the customer deployment team and Arlington engineering.

Operate and maintain extensions built by the Arlington team, and feed operational learnings back into their design.

Apply validated changes within the enclave under the guidance of the Arlington engineering and DSO teams.

Monitor the health of data pipelines and platform services on-site using the LGTM stack (Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Mimir).

Track data quality, throughput, and freshness; identify anomalies and degradations before they become incidents. In an air-gapped environment, efficiency compounds.

Build and improve the dashboards and alerts that make pipeline health visible, both on-site and to the Arlington team.

Diagnose and resolve production issues in the data path: failed ingests, malformed source data, pipeline stalls, performance degradation.

Own resolution of incidents within your sphere of responsibility, escalating to Arlington with a clear picture of what you found, not just what triggered the alert.

Drive root cause analysis and post-incident reviews in partnership with the Arlington engineering team, and turn findings into runbooks, fixes, or upstream design changes.

Participate in on-call rotation using PagerDuty, with clear escalation paths to the engineering team. The environment is air-gapped, so off-hours incident response may require returning to the customer facility rather than remoting in.

Serve as a consistent engineering presence for the government customer: professional, reliable, and clear under pressure.

Relay operational observations, data source opportunities, and customer feedback to the Arlington team accurately and promptly.

Work alongside other forward deployed engineers, sharing context and coverage across the on-site team.

Surface patterns from the field that should become platform capabilities, and advocate for them with the product engineering team.

You independently identify the right solution to ambiguous, open-ended problems. New data sources arrive undocumented and messy; you investigate, form a design, and deliver without waiting for a spec.

You respond with urgency to operational issues and own resolution within your sphere. You're unafraid to call an incident when the signal warrants it.

You proactively create and update runbooks and documentation for the components you own. In an environment the rest of the team can't access, what you write down is what they know.

You make informed decisions by consulting the right stakeholders and balancing detail with the big picture, and you execute against the spirit of the requirement, not just the letter.

You actively seek out and eliminate sources of toil. Repetitive manual work in a constrained environment is a design problem, and you treat it like one.

You understand the customer and the mission well enough to know which work has the greatest impact, and you redirect your focus when what you're doing isn't moving the needle.

You tailor your communication to your audience, whether that's a product engineer in Arlington, a DevSecOps teammate, or a non-technical customer stakeholder, and you proactively share information so the right people stay informed and aligned.

You're comfortable operating in secure environments where tooling is limited, internet access is not a given, and the stakes are real.

Experience with data lake and large-scale query technologies (example technologies: Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Trino, Presto, Spark, Athena).

Experience with streaming and message queue technologies (example technologies: Kafka, NATS, Kinesis, RabbitMQ).

Hands-on experience with observability tooling (Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, or similar).

Experience deploying and operating software in air-gapped, classified, or otherwise restricted environments.

Background in a military, intelligence, or defense contracting environment.

Familiarity with containerized environments (Docker, Docker Compose) and CI/CD concepts.

Cloud: AWS (EC2, ECS, RDS, CloudWatch) in closed enclave environments

Containers: Docker, Docker Compose

Observability: Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Mimir (LGTM stack)

Alerting / on-call: PagerDuty

Messaging: NATS

Databases: PostgreSQL

Data integration: Twenty's purpose-built data platform and integration layer (in active development)

Languages in use across engineering: Go, TypeScript, Python

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. Access to systems is restricted and tooling constraints apply.

Benefits What's on the table:

Health. Medical, dental, and vision plan options. Life / AD&D, disability coverage options.

Family. 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.

Vacation. Paid holidays and flexible PTO. Take what you need.

Retirement. 401(k) with pre-tax and Roth options. HSA/FSA options, dependent care FSA.

Benefits vary by location, role, and eligibility. Full plan details provided during the interview and offer process.

If this role sounds like you, apply and share with us your interest

Due to U.S. government contract and security requirements, this role is limited to U.S. citizens. Some positions may also require eligibility to obtain and maintain a U.S. Government security clearance. Any active clearance requirement will be listed in the role description.

Twenty is an 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.

If you need a reasonable accommodation during the hiring process, let us know and we will work with you.