Principal Backend Engineer

About the Company

At Twenty, we're taking on one of the most critical challenges of our time: defending democracies in the digital age. We develop revolutionary technologies that operate at the intersection of the cyber and electromagnetic domains, where the speed of operations exceeds human sensing and complexity transcends conventional boundaries. Our team doesn't just solve problems – we deliver game-changing outcomes that directly impact national security.

We're pragmatic optimists who understand that while our mission of protecting America and its allies is challenging, success is possible.

You will serve as the principal technical authority for Twenty’s backend systems—setting the technical vision, architecture, and standards for mission-critical products used in U.S. national security. You’ll lead major architectural initiatives across teams, building real-time systems that process cyber operation data at machine speed across cloud and on-premises environments. You’ll partner closely with product, security, SRE, and operators to translate complex operational needs into scalable, reliable platforms.

This is a hands‑on technical leadership role for someone who thrives on hard problems, high stakes, and raising the engineering bar.

• You’re energized by building technology that protects democracies and has real‑world operational impact.

• You set high technical standards and raise the quality of systems, decisions, and execution around you.

• You think in architectures and trade‑offs—latency, reliability, security, operability, and cost.

• You lead through influence: clear direction, strong reasoning, and calm decision‑making under pressure.

• You’re comfortable in ambiguous, high‑consequence environments with evolving requirements.

• You mentor senior engineers with direct feedback, strong support, and a bias toward ownership.

• You build trust across disciplines—engineering, security, operations, and government stakeholders.

• Define the technical vision and reference architecture for Twenty’s backend platforms across products.

• Lead organization‑wide architectural initiatives spanning multiple teams and critical systems.

• Architect scalable, fault‑tolerant distributed systems for real‑time operational data processing.

• Design and evolve graph‑based data systems that power relationship mapping and AI‑assisted analysis.

• Establish patterns and standards for microservices, APIs, and event‑driven communication at scale.

• Drive measurable improvements in throughput, latency, reliability, and operability of core services.

• Partner with SRE and security to build defense‑in‑depth systems for high‑assurance environments.

• Mentor senior engineers and technical leads; guide reviews and high‑leverage technical decisions.

• Engage directly with government customers and field teams to validate approaches and priorities.

• Represent backend engineering externally through technical writing, talks, or community contributions.

• You have 12+ years of professional software development experience, including Staff/Principal‑level technical leadership.

• You have mastery‑level proficiency in Go (Golang) building large‑scale production backend systems.

• You have deep experience designing distributed systems (fault tolerance, consensus patterns, and resilience).

• You have expert‑level experience with graph databases (e.g., Neo4j, AWS Neptune) including schema and query optimization.

• You have led major architectural initiatives that changed how multiple teams build and ship systems.

• You have strong cloud‑native experience (especially AWS) including networking and security fundamentals.

• You have a security‑first mindset: threat modeling, secure coding, and practical zero‑trust principles.

• You have a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering (or equivalent practical experience).

• You have experience integrating production AI/ML systems with graph and streaming backends.

• You’ve built event‑driven platforms with NATS, Kafka, Rabbit
  
  MQ, or similar messaging systems.

• You’ve operated hybrid cloud and on‑prem deployments in regulated or constrained environments.

• You’re familiar with government compliance…