Staff Backend Engineer, Exposure Management

Company Background

Censys’ mission is to be the one place to understand everything on the internet. Frustrated by the lack of trustworthy Internet intelligence, we set out to create the industry’s most comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date map of the Internet. Today, Censys delivers real-time Internet intelligence and actionable threat insights to global governments, over 50% of the Fortune 500, and leading threat intelligence providers worldwide.

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 team and 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