Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Censys builds Internet intelligence and threat insight products through large-scale scanning, DNS lookups, web crawling, and data ingestion. The Staff Scanning Engineer will design, build, and operate Internet-scale scanning, backend, distributed systems, and data pipeline infrastructure while improving the accuracy, coverage, freshness, and reliability of Censys’ Internet Map.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate Internet-scale scanning, DNS, crawling, attribution, and data collection systems
- Own production backend services and pipelines that collect, process, validate, and enrich massive Internet datasets
- Improve the quality, freshness, reliability, and coverage of Censys’ Internet Map
- Build systems that support IP scanning, DNS lookups, protocol fingerprinting, asset attribution, and large-scale data ingestion
- Lead technical design for distributed services, streaming pipelines, storage systems, caching layers, scheduling systems, and scan orchestration infrastructure
- Partner with Research, Product, Security, and Engineering teams to turn research ideas into safe, scalable, production-ready systems
- Make thoughtful tradeoffs around reliability, cost, scale, latency, data quality, and operational complexity
- Participate in operational ownership of the systems you build, including observability, incident response, and on-call rotation
- Mentor engineers, review designs, and help raise the technical bar for backend and scanning infrastructure
Skills
- This position is remote within the United States
- 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
- 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
Benefits
- Remote work within the United States.
- Equity.
- Health, dental & vision coverage.
- Retirement with company contribution.
- Parental leave.
- Mental health & wellness benefits.
- Flexible PTO.
- Professional development stipend.
- Sales incentive pay for most sales roles.
- Annual bonus plan for eligible non-sales roles.
- If hired, the opportunity to attend Censys’ HQ in Ann Arbor for in-person onboarding.
Company Overview
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