Staff Backend Engineer

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

Role Summary

Censys is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to join our Exposure Management teamand provide the technical leadership foundation as we evolve our legacy Attack Surface Management (ASM) product into the next-generation Exposure Management offering on our platform. We’re currently building our Supply Chain Intelligence module and will expand to first-party Exposure Management. This work requires deep technical ownership, the ability to bridge legacy and new systems, and the judgment to balance ongoing customer commitments with long-term migration. We’re looking for an engineer who can act as the technical lead for the area, build and extend large-scale, real-time streaming services that leverage our massive datasets, drive cross-team alignment, and mentor the existing team.

What You’ll Do

• Serve as the Tech Lead for the Exposure Management team, driving technical direction across services and strengthening architecture and system design practices, with the ultimate goal of helping our customer reduce their attack surface exposures.
• Own the migration plan and execution to bring legacy ASM functionality onto the new Exposure Management platform, balancing customer commitments on the legacy product with the long-term migration roadmap.
• Take end-to-end ownership of backend services, resolving complex legacy behavior and ensuring seamless interoperability with the new platform.
• Drive technical alignment across shared systems, improving coordination, scalability, and engineering effectiveness.
• Foster a culture of technical excellence through mentorship, architectural leadership, and high engineering standards.
• Leverage AI and LLM technologies to improve engineering efficiency, streamline development workflows, and enhance intelligent capabilities within the Exposure Management platform.

What You’ll Bring

• A positive attitude biased towards action and iterative problem solving, even in legacy code where the answer isn’t obvious
• 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
• 10+ years of experience in software engineering
• 5+ years of experience with Go
• Strong distributed systems background, including the ability to build horizontally scalable systems with high availability and fault-tolerance
• Experience with service-oriented architectures and the operational stack to support them (gRPC/REST, microservices, GCP, Kubernetes)
• Ability to quickly navigate unfamiliar legacy systems, reverse-engineer existing behavior, and resolve complex issues with minimal disruption to execution.
• Strong communication and technical design skills, including the ability to clearly document architectures, identify systemic gaps, and drive solutions from concept through implementation.
• Open to using AI to amplify their skills and strengthen their work - demonstrating curiosity, a willingness to learn, and sound judgment in applying AI responsibly to improve efficiency and impact.

What Sets You Apart

• Go as your primary backend language
• Passion for integrating AI and LLM technologies into engineering workflows to improve velocity, automation, and product experience.
• Experience leading product migrations or platform consolidations, balancing legacy customer commitments with new development on a parallel platform
• Familiarity with microservice-based designs using GCP PubSub or similar event-driven architectures
• 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 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.

For all other US locations, the expected salary range for this position is $172,000 USD – $216,000 USD, plus bonus eligibility and equity.

Job 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.

Censys 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.

We 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.

To 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.

By 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.

Our 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.

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.