Remote Senior Security Research Engineer

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:

Security researchers have a strong technical background and excel at creative problem solving. You rely on your expertise to guide your approach to investigations, including generating your own research ideas. This role will help provide the engineering teams with the information needed to provide better coverage, derive deeper insights from our data, and help surface these improvements directly to our customers.

One week you might perform detailed analysis of hosts vulnerable to a particular CVE, and the next week you may be asked to investigate which endpoints we need to scan to improve classification of networking devices. You'll have the opportunity to hunt through the most robust internet-wide scan data available, documenting your findings to share with the broader security community through blogs and talks.

What you’ll do:

• Conduct Internet measurement research using Censys’ Internet-wide scan data; identify and analyze Internet-wide trends with a focus on findings with interesting security implications.


• Partner with Research and Product to deliver new security prototypes to customers as well as to guide where we should develop new products.


• Inspect, mine, transform, and analyze large datasets to identify patterns and trends to further support engineering efforts such as predictive modeling of scan targets, software and hardware identification, vulnerability detection, threat actor identification, and more.


• Work closely with multiple engineering teams to help inform technical decision making in regards to providing better coverage, context, and insights.


• Assist in data classification and dataset interrogation using techniques such as entity and identity resolution, cluster, data gap analysis, and others.


• As needed, serve as a public face for Censys by sharing knowledge and expertise around how Internet-wide security trends impact our customers across the public and private sectors, as well as the broader global security community


• Other duties as assigned

What you bring:

• Thorough understanding of Internet protocols and technologies, not just how they’re used but how they work. This includes fundamentals such as TCP/IP, HTTP, TLS, etc.


• High proficiency in using analytical databases and warehouse such as Google BigQuery, Snowflake, etc. to interrogate large datasets.


• Ability to conceive, execute, and derive actionable insights from measurements that involve Internet-wide scanning and data collection by using infrastructure to conduct experiments.


• Have strong communication skills and can explain complex technical concepts to other engineers, designers, and product managers.

Bonus Points:

• Familiarity and comfort working in a Linux based environment.


• Basic understanding of design and implementation of fault-tolerant distributed systems.


• Collaborate and communicate well with other engineers working on related systems.


• Enjoy technical architecture discussions and want to help drive technical decision making within the team.


• Continually improve skills, technical approaches, and familiarity with new technologies to help contribute to the success of the team.

For high cost of living areas (San Francisco Bay, New York City, and Seattle), the expected salary range for this position is $180,000 USD - $212,000 USD, plus bonus eligibility and equity.

For other US locations, the expected salary range for this position is $153,000 USD - $180,000 USD, plus bonus eligibility and equity. Actual salary depends on level of experience and geographic location.

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 and our innovation is fueled by the team’s global perspectives. For this role, we are open to remote employees across the continental US or Canada.

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