- 10+ years of software engineering experience building production systems.
- Strong backend engineering experience in systems such as data ingestion pipelines, scanning systems, crawlers, schedulers, APIs, storage systems, or high-throughput services.
- Experience designing and operating systems that handle large-scale data, high request volume, or Internet-scale workloads.
- Strong programming experience; we primarily use Go.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
- Experience with message queues or streaming systems such as Google Pub/Sub, Kafka, Kinesis, or similar technologies.
- Experience with distributed databases or large-scale storage systems such as Bigtable, Spanner, HBase, Cassandra, Postgres, or similar.
- Strong understanding of reliability, observability, testing, deployment, and operational ownership.
- Ability to write understandable, testable, maintainable code.
- Strong technical communication skills, with the ability to explain complex systems to engineers, product managers, researchers, and leadership.
- Good judgment around when and how to use AI-assisted development tools.
Things that make you stand out
- Experience building or operating scanners, crawlers, DNS infrastructure, passive/active measurement systems, or Internet data collection platforms.
- Deep understanding of DNS and how it is used in practice, including resolution, delegation, record types, nameservers, and operational edge cases.
- Knowledge of Internet protocols, service discovery, network measurement, protocol fingerprinting, or large-scale crawling.
- Experience with attribution systems, asset mapping, cloud asset discovery, or connecting Internet-facing services back to organizations.
- Experience turning research prototypes into reliable, maintainable production systems.
- Familiarity with gRPC, REST, Protobuf, MessagePack, or other API and serialization technologies.
- Experience building, deploying, and maintaining containerized services in Kubernetes.
- Experience with scan orchestration, scheduling, rate limiting, backpressure, retries, deduplication, or distributed task execution.
- Experience working across the boundary of research and engineering, especially in security, infrastructure, networking, or Internet measurement.
- Curiosity about how the Internet works and a desire to build systems that make it more understandable.
For high cost of living areas (San Francisco Bay, New York City, and Seattle), the expected salary range for this position is $198,000 USD – $233,000 USD, plus bonus eligibility and equity.
For all other US locations, the expected salary range for this position is $172,000 USD – $216,000 USD, plus bonus eligibility and equity.
Job level and actual compensation will be decided based on factors including, but not limited to, individual qualifications objectively assessed during the interview process (including skills and prior relevant experience, potential impact, and scope of role), market demands, and specific work location. The listed range is a guideline, and the range for this role may be modified. For roles that are available to be filled remotely, the pay range is localized according to employee work location by a factor of between 83% and 100% of range. Please discuss your specific work location with your recruiter for more information.
Censys offers a competitive benefits package to employees, including equity, health, dental & vision coverage, retirement with company contribution, parental leave, mental health & wellness benefits, flexible PTO, and a professional development stipend. Censys also offers sales incentive pay for most sales roles and an annual bonus plan for eligible non-sales roles. Censys’s compensation and benefits are subject to change and may be modified in the future. Please see our careers page for more details.
To ensure the integrity of our hiring process and facilitate a more personal connection, we require all candidates to keep their cameras on during video interviews. Additionally, if hired, we would love to bring you to our HQ in Ann Arbor for in-person onboarding.
By applying for this job, the candidate acknowledges and agrees that any personal data contained in their application or supporting materials will be processed in accordance with our Censys Privacy Policy.
Note to external recruiters/agencies: We are not currently engaging with third-party agencies for this role and will not accept unsolicited outreach. We kindly ask that you do not submit resumes or candidate profiles to our team.
Identity Verification
As part of our hiring process, all candidates who receive an offer of employment will be asked to complete an identity verification through CLEAR.