Censys
Staff Scanning Engineer
RemoteUnited States only
- Role
- Backend
- Experience
- Staff
$198k–$233k/yr
Check eligibility
Open to US only. Set where you work from to check your eligibility.
No BS summary
Staff-level backend/distributed-systems engineer with 10+ years building production systems. Must have strong Go and cloud/streaming/database experience and experience operating large-scale scanning/crawling or data ingestion pipelines. Remote within the United States (continental US).
Core skills
GoDNSInternet-scale scanning
Required skills
Cloud infrastructure (AWS)Cloud infrastructure (GCP)Cloud infrastructure (Azure)Google Pub/Sub/Kafka/KinesisBigtable/Spanner/HBase/Cassandra/PostgreSQLgRPCRESTProtobufMessagePackobservabilitydata ingestion pipelinesscanning/crawling systemsAWS/GCP/Azure
Optional skills
scanners and crawlersDNS infrastructureprotocol fingerprintingattribution systemsasset mappingcloud asset discoveryKubernetesscan orchestration
What you'll do
- 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.
What they require
- 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.
Benefits
- equity
- health, dental & vision coverage
- retirement with company contribution
- parental leave
- mental health & wellness benefits
- flexible PTO
- professional development stipend
- bonus eligibility (annual for eligible non-sales roles)
- sales incentive pay for most sales roles
Censys delivers real-time Internet intelligence and actionable threat insights to global governments, over 50% of the Fortune 500, and leading threat intelligence providers worldwide. Its platform helps security teams uncover hidden threats, gain actionable insights, and build proactive defense strategies.
$198k–$233k/yr