Staff / Principal Backend Software Engineer

You’re motivated by high-stakes, real-world outcomes—especially in national security and cyber operations.

You take ownership: you push projects from ambiguous problem to shipped, measured capability.

You bring calm, high-judgment leadership during incidents, tradeoff discussions, and tight timelines.

You hold a high bar for reliability, security, and maintainability—and you help others meet it.

You communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical partners.

You prefer simple, scalable designs and know when complexity is justified.

You enjoy mentoring and leveling up engineers through feedback, pairing, and strong technical direction.

You have experience designing data models and queries in graph databases (e.g., Neo4j, AWS Neptune).

You have used relational databases (ex: Postgres, MySQL, or MariaDB) to solve business problems and are able to reason about query performance.

You’ve worked on defense, intelligence, or security-focused products with real operational users.

You’ve shipped large-scale data processing systems (streaming, near-real-time analytics, or similar).

You’ve integrated ML/AI capabilities into production systems in a practical, measurable way.

You have open-source contributions or personal projects that demonstrate strong engineering craft.

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 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.