Senior Backend Engineer, Distributed Systems

Location: This position is remote within the United States or Canada. 

Role Summary: 

We’re looking to hire a Senior Distributed Systems Engineer on our Internet Map Connections team to build highly-available and scalable, data-driven services that provide value directly to customers and across our organization. Censys operates distributed infrastructure for Internet-wide scanning, bulk DNS resolution, and X.509 certificate ingestion: your job will be to go below the surface of our data, and help us find and attribute ownership to assets and find how assets on the Internet relate to one another.

 

At Censys, we believe in working iteratively, but we’re always thinking about the big picture. We’re building a platform that enables fast development of future products, and integration with new data collection methods. You'd be great for this position if you're someone who considers not just initial development, but ongoing maintenance and monitoring. You consider delivery and developer experience, and everything you do can be built upon in the future by others.

 

What You’ll Do

• Design and build services that power existing and future products at Censys by building our next-generation attribution engine, used to determine entity ownership and connections between assets in the Censys Internet Map.
• Work closely with our Coverage and Context Internet Map teams to help ensure Censys maintains the most comprehensive, complete, and context rich datasets.
• Build and extend large scale, real-time streaming services and applications which leverage our massive datasets to power internal product APIs and external applications.
• Leverage a multitude of software architectures and techniques, including messaging queues, eventual consistency semantics, distributed locking, clustering, CQRS, and others.
• Interface with a polyglot codebase, including working with existing Python and Go applications.

 

What you’ll bring:

• A positive attitude biased towards action and iterative problem solving, learning as we grow every step of the way.
• A deep understanding of how the Internet works. For example, WHOIS, Certificate Subject Alternative Names (SANs), and DNS record types should not be foreign to you.
• 5+ years of experience in software engineering.
• 3+ years of experience with Golang.
• Experience with REST/gRPC and service-oriented architectures.
• Distributed systems experience: Ability to build horizontally scalable systems, with a high degree of availability and fault-tolerance leveraging techniques such as distributed locking, load-shedding, etc.
• The ability to thoughtfully participate in technical discussions and drive towards data-driven decisions amidst ambiguity and competing priorities.
• Strong communication and documentation skills. Explaining complex technical concepts to other engineers, designers, salespeople, and content marketers is no problem for you.

 

Skills that set you apart:

• You have experience with microservice-based designs with GCP PubSub, etc, and know their tradeoffs.
• Experience building, deploying, and maintaining containerized services in a Kubernetes based environment.
• Familiarity writing analytical SQL and/or optimizing reading and writing to large datasets in OLAP databases such as Snowflake, Google BigQuery, etc.
• You understand the value of building maintainable software. Some of your first tasks when building a new service are ensuring test coverage enforced by CI, adding linters, and adding code complexity checks. You enjoy a good abstraction, and promote established design patterns, but also know when to think outside the box.

 

For candidates located in high cost of living locations, the salary range for this position is $180,000 - $245,000 + bonus eligibility and equity.

For candidates located in any other location, the salary range for this position is $153,000 - $208,000 + bonus eligibility and equity.

 

In addition to our great compensation package, our benefits are effective on day one and include but are not limited to 401k match, health, vision, dental, and more! Please see our careers page for more details.

Our roots are in Ann Arbor, Michigan. For this role, we are open to remote employees across the continental US or Canada. 

 

Note 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.