Staff Backend Engineer (Exposure Management, Golang)

Role Overview

Join Censys as a Staff Backend Engineer on the Exposure Management team. You will provide technical leadership while evolving a legacy Attack Surface Management product into a next-generation Exposure Management platform. The role includes end-to-end ownership of backend services and leveraging AI/LLM technologies to improve engineering efficiency.

Key Missions / Responsibilities

• Act as the technical lead for the Exposure Management team, driving technical direction, strengthening architecture and system design practices.
• Own the migration plan and execution to bring legacy ASM functionality onto the new Exposure Management platform, balancing legacy customer commitments with the long-term roadmap.
• Drive technical alignment across shared systems to improve coordination, scalability, and engineering effectiveness.
• Take end-to-end ownership of backend services and contribute to platform improvements.
• Leverage AI and LLMs to improve engineering workflow velocity, automation, and platform experience.

Required Profile

• Experience with service-oriented architectures and the operational stack supporting them:
  • gRPC/REST, microservices, GCP, Kubernetes
• Deep understanding of how the internet works, including familiarity with:
  • WHOIS, DNS record types, and Certificate SAN (Subject Alternative Names)
• Strong distributed systems background:
  • ability to build horizontally scalable, high-availability and fault-tolerant systems
• Strong capability to work in and with legacy systems:
  • reverse-engineering behavior, resolving complex issues with minimal disruption
• 10+ years software engineering experience
• 5+ years with Golang
• Open to using AI responsibly to amplify skills and improve work efficiency/impact
• Strong communication and technical design skills:
  • document architectures, identify systemic gaps, drive solutions from concept to implementation
• Value maintainable software; experience setting up:
  • test coverage enforced by CI, linters, and code complexity checks
• Familiarity with microservice-based, event-driven architectures using GCP Pub/Sub or similar
• Experience leading product migrations/platform consolidations with parallel development alongside legacy support
• Passion for integrating AI/LLMs into engineering workflows

Nice-to-have (implicit through responsibilities)

• Demonstrated architectural rigor and design-pattern judgment, including knowing when to diverge from patterns.
• Proven ability to strengthen engineering effectiveness across shared systems.