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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 and threat insights to governments, Fortune 500 companies, and threat intelligence providers worldwide.
You will join the Internet Map Connections team as a Senior Distributed Systems Engineer to build highly-available, scalable, data-driven services. Censys operates distributed infrastructure for Internet-wide scanning, bulk DNS resolution, and X.509 certificate ingestion. Your work will involve going deep into data systems to help identify and attribute asset ownership and understand how assets on the Internet relate to one another.
The role emphasizes iterative development with a focus on the big picture: you'll build platforms that enable fast product development and integration with new data collection methods. You'll consider not just initial development but ongoing maintenance, monitoring, delivery, and developer experience—ensuring everything you build can be extended by others.
Key responsibilities:
- Build large-scale, real-time services and applications leveraging massive datasets to power internal APIs and external applications
- Create tooling, libraries, frameworks, and services supporting security, research, and data platform initiatives
- Productionize prototypes into reliable internal tools, services, or platform capabilities
- Participate in planning and technical discussions with engineering and product teams
- Develop and maintain systems including data pipelines, messaging systems, databases, caching layers, and services running in cloud or on-premises environments
- Collaborate with Machine Learning Engineers and Security Researchers to realize solutions affecting security outcomes
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, maintainable code
- 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
Desirable qualifications:
- Familiarity with gRPC or REST
- Experience 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
