Research Scientist - IPinfo

Research Scientist

About IPinfo

IPinfo is a leading provider of IP address data: geolocation, VPN and residential proxy detection, mobile carrier, IP to company, and more than 20 other context tags. Our API handles over 1 billion requests a day, and companies such as Cloudflare, T-Mobile, and SpaceX build our data into their products. We're a fast-growing, bootstrapped company with a fully remote team of more than 80 people. We sponsor academic conferences such as ACM IMC, ACM CoNEXT and TMA, and we collaborate with academic researchers at CAIDA, RIPE NCC, M-Lab, the Internet Society, IIJ, Georgia Tech, and other institutions.

The role

Our measurement platform, ProbeNet, collects more than 50TB of ping, traceroute, BGP and DNS data every week from over 1,300 servers around the world. This role doesn't hand you a clean dataset to analyze. You decide what we measure, design the method, prove it's correct against ground truth, and ship it into products that over a billion API requests a day rely on.

The problems are open research questions, such as these:

• Geolocating the whole routed address space. That means every IPv4 and IPv6 prefix at city level, including prefixes that don't answer probes, sit behind anycast, or publish geofeeds that are wrong.
• Claimed vs. measured location. Find the VPN exit nodes whose advertised location is physically impossible given measured latency. This has to work across hundreds of providers and millions of IPs.
• Topology from imperfect traceroutes. Map anycast deployments, router-level topology and submarine cable paths from paths that are incomplete, asymmetric and distorted by load balancing and MPLS.
• IPv6 at scale. Build target lists and inference methods for an address space that can't be scanned exhaustively.

What you'll do

• Drive work on research problems from the question to production. Design measurements, run them on ProbeNet and public platforms such as RIPE Atlas, validate them against ground truth, and carry the result into our BigQuery and Airflow pipelines.
• Measure every claim you make about our data in IP addresses against ground truth, not with anecdotes.
• Work on paper submissions to top venues with academic collaborators.
• Co-supervise our PhD summer research interns.
• Present your work externally at IMC, TMA, RIPE and NANOG, and also internally within the company.

Requirements

• A completed (or close to completion) PhD in computer science or a closely related field, with a dissertation in Internet measurement. Examples are active or passive measurement, routing, topology, DNS, IP geolocation, or security measurement. We won't consider applications without one. Industry experience doesn't substitute for it.
• At least two first-author papers at ACM IMC, SIGCOMM, CoNEXT, PAM, TMA, NSDI, USENIX Security, NDSS, IEEE S&P or ACM CCS, or in ACM SIGCOMM CCR or IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.
• Hands-on experience designing and running your own Internet-scale measurements. For example: ZMap-style scanning, traceroute campaigns, RIPE Atlas, BGP collectors (RouteViews, RIS), or DNS measurements.
• Deep knowledge of how the Internet actually works: BGP, address allocation (RIRs, WHOIS, RPKI), IPv6, DNS, anycast, CDNs, and the artifacts that mislead traceroute analysis.
• Statistical rigor. You can design a validation, quantify uncertainty, and tell a real signal from a measurement artifact.
• Strong Python or Go, and fluent SQL on multi-terabyte datasets (we use BigQuery).
• Clear writing, for reviewers and for customers alike.

Nice to have

• Prior work on IP geolocation, VPN or proxy detection, or anycast.
• Open datasets or tools that the community uses.
• Program committee service at IMC, PAM, TMA, or other conferences.

How we work

We're spread across the globe. The whole company meets on a monthly all-hands call, and you'll have weekly meetings with your manager and the research team. Everything else happens asynchronously in Slack, GitHub, and Linear, so you choose the hours when you do your best work. That only works with a high level of autonomy and ownership. You'll set your own direction, and no one will break your work down into tickets for you.

What we offer

• Research that ships: your methods end up in products used by millions.
• Access to ProbeNet and our full measurement archive.
• A 100% remote team with flexible working hours.
• A competitive salary.
• A flexible vacation policy.

How to apply

Send your CV, a link to your dissertation, and a cover letter of no more than one page that answers:

• Which of your papers best shows how you work, and what would you do differently today?
• Pick one of the open research questions above. How would you validate a solution when ground truth is scarce?
• Why do you think you would be a good fit for the role?

Application deadline

Please submit your application by November 30, 2026.