Staff Scanning Engineer, Censys

• We’re looking for someone with deep technical ownership, strong production engineering instincts, curiosity about how the Internet works, and the ability to mentor others while building reliable systems
• 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

Desirable

• We’re looking for a Staff Software Developer to help design, build, and operate the systems that power Censys’ Internet-wide scanning, DNS resolution, attribution, and data pipelines
• This role sits at the intersection of backend engineering, distributed systems, and applied Internet research. You will work on production systems that discover, collect, validate, and enrich Internet-scale data across IPs, domains, certificates, services, and cloud infrastructure
• You will help improve the accuracy, coverage, freshness, and reliability of the Internet Map that powers Censys’ products and research
• At Censys, we work iteratively, but we are always thinking about the big picture. We’re expanding our scanning and data platform to make the Internet more explainable: richer context, better attribution, clearer relationships, and higher-confidence signals
• 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