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Salary: USD 151,000 - 206,000 / annual
Censys is building the industry's most comprehensive map of the Internet, delivering real-time Internet intelligence to governments, Fortune 500 companies, and threat intelligence providers worldwide. We're hiring a Senior Distributed Systems Engineer to join our Internet Map Connections team and build highly-available, scalable, data-driven services that power both customer-facing and internal applications.
You'll work on Censys's distributed infrastructure for Internet-wide scanning, bulk DNS resolution, and X.509 certificate ingestion. Your responsibilities will include:
- Building large-scale, real-time services and applications that leverage massive datasets to power internal APIs and external applications
- Developing tooling, libraries, frameworks, and services supporting security, research, and data platform initiatives
- Productionizing prototypes into reliable internal tools, services, or platform capabilities
- Participating in planning and technical discussions with engineering and product teams
- Developing and maintaining systems such as data pipelines, messaging systems, databases, caching layers, and services running in cloud or on-premises environments
- Collaborating with Machine Learning Engineers and Security Researchers to realize solutions that affect security outcomes
The role emphasizes iterative development with long-term thinking. You'll consider not just initial development but ongoing maintenance, monitoring, delivery, and developer experience. Everything you build should be maintainable and extensible for future team members.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience building distributed systems (data ingestion pipelines, databases, services)
- Experience with object-oriented programming; Go is used at Censys
- Experience with at least one cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
- Experience or familiarity with message queue technologies (AWS Kinesis, Google Pub/Sub, Kafka, or similar)
- Experience working with databases (BigTable, Cloud Spanner, HBase, Cassandra, or similar)
- Understanding of core distributed systems concepts: scalability, fault tolerance, and reliability
- Familiarity with using AI
- Ability to write understandable, testable code with attention to maintainability
- Strong communication skills and ability to work effectively with engineers and product managers
- Openness to using AI to amplify skills and strengthen work, demonstrating curiosity and sound judgment in responsible AI application
STAND-OUT QUALIFICATIONS:
- Familiarity with gRPC or REST
- Familiarity with data serialization technologies (Protobuf, MessagePack, etc.)
- Experience building, deploying, or maintaining containerized services in Kubernetes
- Understanding of how the Internet works and how machines/services communicate using defined protocols/standards
- Security domain knowledge
