{"id":213263,"url":"https://alion.io/job/censys-staff-scanning-engineer","title":"Staff Scanning Engineer","company":{"id":15491,"name":"Censys","domain":"censys.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/censys","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":80,"open_postings":5,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.8,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":28,"computed_at":"2026-10-30T05:48:23Z"}},"role":"Industrial Engineering","role_family":"Industrial Engineering","seniority":"staff","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":198000,"max":233000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":233000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Amazon Kinesis","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"Cassandra","optional":false},{"name":"Censys","optional":false},{"name":"DNS","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Google Bigtable","optional":false},{"name":"Google Cloud Spanner","optional":false},{"name":"gRPC","optional":false},{"name":"HBase","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Rest API","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-20T23:56:28Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-03","last_verified_at":"2026-10-30T10:25:36Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":70,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":70},"description":"Company Background\nCensys’ 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.\nCensys 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.\nLocation: This position is remote within the United States.\nRole Summary: \nWe’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.\nThis 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.\nAt 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.\nWhat You’ll Do:\nDesign, build, and operate Internet-scale scanning, DNS, crawling, attribution, and data collection systems.\nOwn production backend services and pipelines that collect, process, validate, and enrich massive Internet datasets.\nImprove the quality, freshness, reliability, and coverage of Censys’ Internet Map.\nBuild systems that support IP scanning, DNS lookups, protocol fingerprinting, asset attribution, and large-scale data ingestion.\nLead technical design for distributed services, streaming pipelines, storage systems, caching layers, scheduling systems, and scan orchestration infrastructure.\nPartner with Research, Product, Security, and Engineering teams to turn research ideas into safe, scalable, production-ready systems.\nMake thoughtful tradeoffs around reliability, cost, scale, latency, data quality, and operational complexity.\nParticipate in operational ownership of the systems you build, including observability, incident response, and on-call rotation.\nMentor engineers, review designs, and help raise the technical bar for backend and scanning infrastructure.\nSkills You Have:\n10+ years of software engineering experience building production systems.\nStrong backend engineering experience in systems such as data ingestion pipelines, scanning systems, crawlers, schedulers, APIs, storage systems, or high-throughput services.\nExperience designing and operating systems that handle large-scale data, high request volume, or Internet-scale workloads.\nStrong programming experience; we primarily use Go.\nExperience with cloud infrastructure such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.\nExperience with message queues or streaming systems such as Google Pub/Sub, Kafka, Kinesis, or similar technologies.\nExperience with distributed databases or large-scale storage systems such as Bigtable, Spanner, HBase, Cassandra, Postgres, or similar.\nStrong understanding of reliability, observability, testing, deployment, and operational ownership.\nAbility to write understandable, testable, maintainable code.\nStrong technical communication skills, with the ability to explain complex systems to engineers, product managers, researchers, and leadership.\nGood judgment around when and how to use AI-assisted development tools.\nThings that make you stand out:\nExperience building or operating scanners, crawlers, DNS infrastructure, passive/active measurement systems, or Internet data collection platforms.\nDeep understanding of DNS and how it is used in practice, including resolution, delegation, record types, nameservers, and operational edge cases.\nKnowledge of Internet protocols, service discovery, network measurement, protocol fingerprinting, or large-scale crawling.\nExperience with attribution systems, asset mapping, cloud asset discovery, or connecting Internet-facing services back to organizations.\nExperience turning research prototypes into reliable, maintainable production systems.\nFamiliarity with gRPC, REST, Protobuf, MessagePack, or other API and serialization technologies.\nExperience building, deploying, and maintaining containerized services in Kubernetes.\nExperience with scan orchestration, scheduling, rate limiting, backpressure, retries, deduplication, or distributed task execution.\nExperience working across the boundary of research and engineering, especially in security, infrastructure, networking, or Internet measurement.\nCuriosity about how the Internet works and a desire to build systems that make it more understandable.\nFor high cost of living areas (San Francisco Bay, New York City, and Seattle), the expected salary range for this position is $198,000 USD - $233,000 USD, plus bonus eligibility and equity.\nFor all other US locations, the expected salary range for this position is $172,000 USD - $216,000 USD, plus bonus eligibility and equity.\nJob level and actual compensation will be decided based on factors including, but not limited to, individual qualifications objectively assessed during the interview process (including skills and prior relevant experience, potential impact, and scope of role), market demands, and specific work location. The listed range is a guideline, and the range for this role may be modified. For roles that are available to be filled remotely, the pay range is localized according to employee work location by a factor of between 83% and 100% of range. Please discuss your specific work location with your recruiter for more information.\nCensys offers a competitive benefits package to employees, including equity, health, dental & vision coverage, retirement with company contribution, parental leave, mental health & wellness benefits, flexible PTO, and a professional development stipend. Censys also offers sales incentive pay for most sales roles and an annual bonus plan for eligible non-sales roles. Censys’s compensation and benefits are subject to change and may be modified in the future. Please see our careers page for more details.\nWe will work to ensure individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to apply for a role, participate in the interview process, perform essential job functions, and receive other benefits and privileges of employment. If you require accommodation, please reach out to your recruiter. These modifications enable an individual with a disability to have an equal opportunity not only to get a job, but successfully perform their job tasks to the same extent as people without disabilities.\nTo ensure the integrity of our hiring process and facilitate a more personal connection, we require all candidates to keep their cameras on during video interviews. Additionally, if hired, we would love to bring you to our HQ in Ann Arbor for in-person onboarding.\nBy applying for this job, the candidate acknowledges and agrees that any personal data contained in their application or supporting materials will be processed in accordance with our Censys Privacy Policy.\nOur roots are in Ann Arbor, Michigan and our innovation is fueled by the team’s global perspectives. For this role, we are open to remote employees across the continental US. We value diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Censys is an equal opportunity employer.\nNote to external recruiters/agencies: We are not currently engaging with third-party agencies for this role and will not accept unsolicited outreach. We kindly ask that you do not submit resumes or candidate profiles to our team.\nIdentity Verification \nAs part of our hiring process, all candidates who receive an offer of employment will be asked to complete an identity verification through CLEAR.\nCalifornia Privacy Rights Notice\nPursuant to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), we are providing you with notice that we collect personal information from job applicants for business purposes, including evaluating your candidacy for employment, conducting interviews, and, if applicable, completing the hiring process. The categories of information we may collect include identifiers (such as name and contact information), professional or employment-related information (such as work history, education, and references), and other information you provide in your application. We do not sell or share your personal information. For more information on how we use and protect your personal information, and your rights under the CCPA, please refer to our Privacy Policy.","description_format":"text","description_chars":9730,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":10,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Parental leave","Professional development"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Cybersecurity","Threat Intelligence","Information Security","Vulnerability Management"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-05T08:39:56Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":6,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":0.4,"p_active":0.558,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":70,"expected_fill_days":28,"reasons":["seen:56","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-30T05:48:23Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":233000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/censys-staff-scanning-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/censys-staff-scanning-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-30T12:53:34Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":18478,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-31T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":15491},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=15491"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fcensys-staff-scanning-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fcensys-staff-scanning-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fcensys-staff-scanning-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/censys-staff-scanning-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fcensys-staff-scanning-engineer"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":213263}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"censys.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":213263},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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