Twenty is a cyber warfare startup that builds AI-enabled, end-to-end offensive cyber systems for the U.S. military and the Intelligence Community.
ABOUT THE COMPANY America is under sustained cyber attack. Our adversaries infiltrate our networks, steal our IP, and degrade the digital infrastructure that modern life runs on. They’ve learned—correctly—that those attacks rarely produce consequences. Twenty was founded to change that, by making our adversaries think twice before they attack us. Our vision is American and allied primacy in cyberspace—a future where they cannot contest us, deterrence is assured, and the free world remains secure. Founded in 2024, Twenty Technologies (www.twenty.io http://www.twenty.io) industrializes offensive cyber operations for the U.S. and its allies. Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, Twenty has raised $168M from Khosla Ventures, Accel, Caffeinated Capital, Friends & Family Capital, Point72 Ventures, General Catalyst, and In-Q-Tel. ROLE SUMMARY You will lead the Platform Team—the engineering foundation that makes our core product usable, governable, and scalable across organizations. Your team owns the enterprise capabilities that allow customers to onboard, administer, and secure Twenty's products; the shared UI framework consumed by feature teams across the product; and the infrastructure underpinning it all. This is a platform-oriented role with a customer-facing component. Much of what your team builds is consumed as a service by feature teams—your work is a critical dependency for engineering across the product. You'll own the technical roadmap and partner closely with a Product Manager who spans both platform and feature teams and owns the product roadmap. Day to day, you'll lead a growing team of engineers across frontend, backend, and infrastructure—keeping everyone pointed in the right direction, running projects, resolving technical dependencies, setting standards, and shipping. This is a player-coach role. Your primary function is management and delivery, with occasional hands-on technical contributions when it accelerates the team. WHO YOU ARE - You're equally comfortable in a design review and a 1:1—you bring the same rigor to both. - You think in systems: architecture, interfaces, team structure, and delivery dependencies, not just tickets. - You hold a high bar without creating drag—you know when to push and when to get out of the way. - You execute: you drive projects to completion, make decisions under uncertainty, and actively resolve ambiguity before it becomes drift. - You communicate crisply with engineers, operators, and leadership, without losing technical truth. - You're energized by platform work: building foundations that others build on, and getting the interfaces right. - You bring calm, structured decision-making to ambiguous, fast-moving problem spaces. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Lead and develop a cross-disciplinary team of engineers spanning frontend, backend, and infrastructure. - Own the technical roadmap; partner with the Product Manager on the product roadmap. - Run projects and workstreams end-to-end—setting timelines, resolving blockers, and keeping the team moving. - Guide architecture and technical decisions across the platform stack to keep systems coherent, secure, and scalable. - Establish and enforce engineering quality standards: design reviews, testing discipline, documentation, and security practices. - Define and maintain the interfaces and shared capabilities that feature teams consume. - Hire, onboard, and develop engineers; give direct feedback, build growth plans, and cultivate technical leadership within the team. - Run structured hiring end-to-end: define the bar, build the interview process, run rigorous debriefs, and close strong candidates. - Collaborate with feature teams and other internal consumers to ensure platform capabilities meet their needs. - Coordinate cross-team dependencies and communicate clearly on timelines, risks, and tradeoffs. - Occasionally contribute hands-on—code review, implementation, or debugging—when it unblocks the team or accelerates delivery. MUST HAVE - You have 5+ years of professional software engineering experience. - You have 3–5 years of engineering management experience, with a track record of delivering on time at high quality. - You've led teams of mixed discipline (frontend, backend, and/or infrastructure engineers) and managed engineers across seniority levels. - You have strong technical breadth across modern web platforms and backend services: you can read the code, evaluate architecture, and understand interface contracts without being a specialist in every layer. - You've owned a technical roadmap and made sound prioritization calls under real constraints. - You've built and maintained platform or shared-service capabilities consumed by other engineering teams, or are eager to grow into this responsibility. - You have a track record of developing ICs: clear expectations, regular feedback, and coaching that creates growth. - You must be eligible to obtain a U.S. Government security clearance. NICE TO HAVE - You have experience in defense, intelligence, or national security technology environments. - You've worked with graph databases (e.g., Neo4j) or graph-based modeling for complex analytical problems. - You've built or scaled enterprise features: multi-tenancy, RBAC, audit logging, or similar. - You've led teams shipping authentication and authorization infrastructure (AuthN, AuthZ, SSO). - You have experience with secure development practices for government or controlled environments. - You have background in cybersecurity, networking, or data-intensive domains — cyber operations experience is a plus but not a requirement. TECH ENVIRONMENT (YOU MIGHT WORK WITH) - React + TypeScript for user-facing applications and shared UI components - Go (and sometimes Python) for backend services and integrations - Neo4j and graph-based data modeling for core platform capabilities - PostgreSQL, Terraform, Ansible, and