Applied AI Engineer - Twenty - Washington, DC
Twenty
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.
Role Summary
You’ll build and ship language-model-powered systems that strengthen Twenty’s mission-critical cyber capabilities for U.S. national security. You’ll own the end-to-end workflow—from curating specialized datasets and post-training models to deploying reliable inference and retrieval systems in production. You’ll partner closely with product and engineering to translate real operational needs into high-performing AI features, operating across cloud and on-premises environments where speed, correctness, and security matter.
Who You Are
• You’re motivated by real-world outcomes and want your work to directly impact national security missions.
• You care about rigor: clean data, measurable evaluation, and repeatable experiments beat demos.
• You balance research curiosity with product instincts—you ship, observe, iterate, and harden.
• You’re comfortable working across cloud and on-premises constraints and adapting to the environment.
• You communicate clearly with engineers and non-ML partners, and you write documentation people use.
• You think in systems: models, retrieval, infrastructure, and feedback loops all have to work together.
• You thrive in fast-moving teams with high standards, direct feedback, and high ownership.
What You’ll Do
• Create, clean, and maintain high-quality training and evaluation datasets for specialized AI use cases.
• Fine-tune lang