Staff Backend Engineer, Exposure Management

About the role

Censys is looking for a technical lead to guide the evolution of our legacy Attack Surface Management product into a modern Exposure Management platform. You will oversee the development of our Supply Chain Intelligence module while managing the migration of existing services and mentoring our engineering team.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Lead technical strategy for the Exposure Management team to improve system architecture and design.
• Direct the migration of legacy ASM functionality to the new platform while maintaining existing customer commitments.
• Manage backend services end-to-end, ensuring interoperability between new and legacy systems.
• Coordinate across teams to improve scalability and engineering effectiveness.
• Promote technical excellence through mentorship and architectural leadership.
• Integrate AI and LLM tools to optimize development workflows and platform capabilities.

Requirements

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 5+ years of experience working with Go.
• Deep knowledge of internet protocols and data, including WHOIS, DNS record types, and Certificate SANs.
• Background in building horizontally scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems.
• Experience with service-oriented architectures, including microservices, gRPC, REST, Kubernetes, and GCP.
• Ability to reverse-engineer and navigate complex legacy codebases.
• Strong technical communication and documentation skills.
• Willingness to use AI tools to improve efficiency and output.

Nice to have

• Go as your primary programming language.
• Experience managing product migrations or platform consolidations.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures such as GCP PubSub.
• Proven track record of enforcing high code quality through CI, linters, and test coverage.

Skills & tools

• Go
• GCP
• Kubernetes
• gRPC / REST
• Microservices
• PubSub
• AI / LLM integration

Practical notes

• Salary range (SF, NYC, Seattle): $198,000 to $233,000 USD plus bonus and equity.
• Salary range (Other US locations): $172,000 to $216,000 USD plus bonus and equity.
• Benefits include health, dental, vision, retirement matching, parental leave, mental health support, flexible PTO, and professional development stipends.
• Candidates must keep cameras on during video interviews.
• In-person onboarding at the Ann Arbor, MI headquarters is required for new hires.
• Reasonable accommodations are available for applicants with disabilities.