Staff Scanning Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Design, develop, and manage Internet-scale scanning, DNS, crawling, attribution, and data collection systems.

• Take ownership of backend services and pipelines responsible for collecting, processing, validating, and enriching vast Internet datasets.

• Enhance the quality, freshness, reliability, and coverage of Censys’ Internet Map.

• Construct systems that facilitate IP scanning, DNS lookups, protocol fingerprinting, asset attribution, and large-scale data ingestion.

• Direct the technical design for distributed services, streaming pipelines, storage systems, caching layers, scheduling systems, and scan orchestration infrastructure.

• Collaborate with Research, Product, Security, and Engineering teams to transform research concepts into safe, scalable, production-ready systems.

• Make decisions regarding reliability, cost, scale, latency, data quality, and operational complexity.

• Engage in observability, incident response, and participate in the on-call rotation.

• Mentor engineers and evaluate design proposals.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of software engineering experience in developing production systems.

• Extensive backend engineering experience with data ingestion pipelines, scanning systems, crawlers, schedulers, APIs, storage systems, or high-throughput services.

• Proven experience in designing and operating systems that manage large-scale data, high request volumes, or Internet-scale workloads.

• Proficient programming skills, primarily in Go.

• Experience with cloud services such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.

• Familiarity with message queue or streaming technologies like Google Pub/Sub, Kafka, Kinesis, or equivalent.

• Experience with distributed databases or large-scale storage systems such as Bigtable, Spanner, HBase, Cassandra, or Postgres.

• Strong grasp of reliability, observability, testing, deployment, and operational ownership.

• Capability to write clear, testable, and maintainable code.

• Excellent technical communication skills.

• Sound judgment in the use of AI-assisted development tools.

• Experience with scanners, crawlers, DNS infrastructure, passive/active measurement systems, or Internet data collection platforms.

• In-depth understanding of DNS, including resolution, delegation, record types, nameservers, and operational edge cases.

• Knowledge of Internet protocols, service discovery, network measurement, protocol fingerprinting, or large-scale crawling.

• Experience with attribution systems, asset mapping, cloud asset discovery, or linking Internet-facing services to organizations.

• Proven track record of converting research prototypes into reliable production systems.

• Familiarity with API and serialization technologies like gRPC, REST, Protobuf, MessagePack, or similar.

• Experience with containerized services in Kubernetes.

• Knowledge of scan orchestration, scheduling, rate limiting, backpressure, retries, deduplication, or distributed task execution.

• Background in both research and engineering, particularly in security, infrastructure, networking, or Internet measurement.

🏝️ Benefits

• Equity.

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage.

• Retirement plan with company contribution.

• Parental leave.

• Mental health and wellness benefits.

• Flexible paid time off (PTO).

• Professional development stipend.

• Annual bonus plan for eligible non-sales positions.

• Reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities.

• In-person onboarding at our headquarters in Ann Arbor.