Senior Backend Engineer

Role overview

As a Senior Backend Engineer at Censys, you will design and develop backend services and APIs that power the company’s data platform. You’ll work on large-scale, real-time streaming systems and partner with engineering and product teams to deliver the right capabilities.

Key missions

• Design and build backend services and APIs that feed Censys’s data platform.
• Collaborate with engineering and product teams to plan and ensure the right features are built.
• Apply systems architecture and design expertise across components such as:
  • message queues
  • databases
  • ingestion pipelines

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience building distributed systems (e.g., data ingestion pipelines, databases, services).
• Proficient with databases such as BigTable, Cloud Spanner, HBase, Cassandra, or similar.
• Experience with message queue / streaming technologies such as AWS Kinesis, Google Pub/Sub, Kafka, or similar.
• Strong communication skills; able to explain technical concepts to engineers and product managers.
• Experience building scalable distributed systems.
• Experience with at least one cloud provider: AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Object-oriented programming experience.
• Build understandable, testable, maintainable code.
• Familiar with gRPC and/or REST.
• Experience deploying and maintaining containerized services on Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with data serialization technologies (e.g., Protobuf, MessagePack).
• Understanding of how the Internet works and how machines/services communicate via protocols.
• Knowledge of DNS and how it’s used in practice.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience/comfort with AI: knowing when and where to apply it.
• Mentorship and a collaborative, ownership-minded approach.
• Use of Go (company uses Go).