Distributed Systems Engineer

Censys is hiring a remote (US) Distributed Systems Engineer to design and operate the large-scale services, APIs, and data foundations that power real-time Internet intelligence. If you enjoy turning research ideas into dependable production systems, this is a chance to shape how the world understands the Internet.

About the Role

As a Distributed Systems Engineer at Censys, you'll build scalable services, frameworks, and internal tooling that process enormous volumes of scanning data and keep it highly available for customers and teams across the company. Censys runs distributed infrastructure for Internet-wide scanning, and you'll help expand our data platform so that complex relationships and richer context become explainable. We work iteratively while staying focused on the larger mission, and we're looking for a curious, collaborative engineer eager to grow.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop real-time, large-scale services and applications that draw on our massive datasets to drive internal APIs and customer-facing products.
• Create libraries, frameworks, and tooling that advance security, research, and data platform efforts.
• Transform prototypes into reliable internal tools, services, and platform capabilities.
• Contribute to planning and technical discussions alongside engineering and product partners.
• Build and maintain data pipelines, messaging systems, databases, caching layers, and cloud or on-prem services.
• Collaborate with Machine Learning Engineers and Security Researchers to deliver measurable security outcomes.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of software engineering experience building distributed systems such as ingestion pipelines, databases, and services.
• Proficiency with object-oriented programming; our stack uses Go.
• Hands-on experience with a major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Familiarity with message queue technologies like AWS Kinesis, Google Pub/Sub, or Kafka.
• Experience with databases such as BigTable, Cloud Spanner, HBase, or Cassandra.
• Solid grasp of scalability, fault tolerance, and reliability principles.
• A habit of writing clear, testable, maintainable code, plus strong communication skills.
• Openness to applying AI responsibly and with sound judgment to amplify your impact.

Bonus points for gRPC or REST, serialization formats like Protobuf or MessagePack, containerized services on Kubernetes, a working knowledge of Internet protocols, and any security domain expertise.

About Censys

Censys aims to be the single place to understand everything on the Internet, delivering accurate, up-to-date intelligence and threat insights to global governments, more than half of the Fortune 500, and leading threat intelligence providers.

How to Apply

To apply, complete your application directly on this page, or you'll be redirected to the employer's application platform to finish submitting there.