# Staff Backend Engineer

**Company:** [Twenty](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/twenty)
**Location:** Arlington, VA
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Experience:** 10+ years
**Skills:** Go, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, GraphQL, Neo4J, Postgres, Nats, Java, Rust
**Posted:** 2025-08-29

> Designs and builds high-throughput backend services processing real-time operational data for national security applications. Requires 10+ years experience, expertise in Golang or similar, distributed systems, AWS, and strong leadership in architecture and mentoring.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Architect and build high-throughput backend services that process real-time operational data.
- Lead technical design reviews and choose pragmatic approaches for new features and system improvements.
- Design event-driven and distributed systems that are resilient, observable, and performance-tuned.
- Define stable APIs for internal and external consumers, partnering with frontend for seamless integration.
- Improve engineering excellence through code reviews, standards, testing strategy, and incident practices.
- Build and maintain CI/CD workflows that enable rapid, secure delivery.
- Troubleshoot complex production issues, lead incident response, and drive durable fixes.
- Partner with product and operational stakeholders to translate needs into deliverable technical plans.
- Contribute to technical strategy and roadmap planning across backend services.
- Support hiring by participating in interviews and helping define what “great” looks like.

## Requirements
**Must Have**
- 10+ years building scalable backend systems in production environments.
- 4+ years of experience in **Golang**, or 4+ years writing server-side business logic in an object-oriented language (**Java**, **Kotlin**, **C#**, **Python**) or systems language (**C**, **C++**, **Rust**) with strong system design aptitude.
- Led technical initiatives end-to-end, including architecture, execution, and delivery.
- Experience designing distributed systems (e.g., event-driven architectures, messaging, consistency tradeoffs).
- Built cloud-native services and operated them in production (**AWS** preferred).
- Strong security fundamentals: secure coding, threat modeling, and defensible design choices.
- Track record mentoring engineers through code reviews, technical guidance, and feedback.
- Strong communication skills and can align teams around clear technical decisions.

**Nice To Have**
- Experience designing data models and queries in graph databases (e.g., **Neo4j**, **AWS Neptune**).
- Used relational databases (**Postgres**, **MySQL**, **MariaDB**) to solve business problems and reason about query performance.
- Worked on defense, intelligence, or security-focused products with real operational users.
- Shipped large-scale data processing systems (streaming, near-real-time analytics, or similar).
- Integrated **ML/AI** capabilities into production systems in a practical, measurable way.
- Open-source contributions or personal projects that demonstrate strong engineering craft.

## Tech Environment
- **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

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**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/effed480-44e6-4409-91d8-ca7c92e92f97
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/effed480-44e6-4409-91d8-ca7c92e92f97