Staff Scanning Engineer

Company Background

Censys’ mission is to be the one place to understand everything on the internet. Frustrated by the lack of trustworthy Internet intelligence, we set out to create the industry’s most comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date map of the Internet. Today, 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.

Censys is building the most credible, robust map of the Internet through IP scanning, DNS lookups, web crawling, and the ingestion of millions of certificates. Censys was founded by security researchers who are passionate about developing technology that provides anyone the power to fully understand their digital risk and exposure. Individuals and enterprises–and anyone in between–can harness this power to discover new information and insight as the Internet, IoT and Cloud evolve. We are a true security startup with midwestern roots and we believe that a map of the Internet, or a map of your organization’s assets can quickly help guide organizations to the answers they need to protect themselves from vulnerability and risk.

Location: This position is remote within the United States.

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. 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.

• 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.

• 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,