Senior Backend Architect: Real-Time, Secure Systems

Twenty; Arlington (VA); On-site; USD 192,000 - 455,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental plan

Vision plan

Life/AD&D

Disability coverage

Parental leave

Paid holidays

Flexible PTO

401(k)

HSA/FSA

Job summary

Twenty in Arlington, VA is seeking an experienced Backend Engineer to design and build high-performance backend services that turn real-time operational data into mission-critical capabilities. This on-site role involves fast, secure systems across cloud and on-prem environments, with mentorship and engineering standards guiding technical decisions.

You will own architecture, lead design reviews, collaborate with product and operations, and help scale services, APIs, and CI/CD pipelines while

Qualifications

• 10+ years building scalable backend systems in production.
• 4+ years in Go, or 4+ years with Java/C#/Python or systems language with strong design.
• Led technical initiatives end-to-end including architecture, execution and delivery.
• Experience designing distributed systems (event-driven, messaging, consistency).
• Built cloud-native services and operated them in production (AWS preferred).
• Strong security fundamentals: secure coding, threat modeling, defensible design.
• Mentored engineers through code reviews, guidance, and feedback.
• Strong communication to align teams around technical decisions.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build high-throughput backend services processing real‑time data.
• Lead technical design reviews and pragmatic approaches for new features and improvements.
• Design distributed, resilient, observable, and performance‑tuned systems.
• Define stable APIs for internal and external consumers with frontend collaboration.
• Improve engineering standards through reviews, testing, and incident practices.
• Build and maintain CI/CD workflows enabling rapid, secure delivery.
• Troubleshoot production issues, lead incident response, drive durable fixes.
• Collaborate with product and operations to translate needs into technical plans.
• Contribute to strategy and roadmap planning across backend services.
• Participate in interviews and help define what great looks like.

Skills

Go

AWS

Kubernetes

Docker

GraphQL

NATS

Microservices

Security basics

Tools

Neo4j

PostgreSQL

MySQL

Job description

Twenty in Arlington, VA is seeking an experienced Backend Engineer to design and build high-performance backend services that turn real-time operational data into mission-critical capabilities. This on-site role involves fast, secure systems across cloud and on-prem environments, with mentorship and engineering standards guiding technical decisions.

You will own architecture, lead design reviews, collaborate with product and operations, and help scale services, APIs, and CI/CD pipelines while