Engineering Manager

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.

Censys is building the most credible, robust map of the Internet through IP scanning, DNS lookups, web crawling, and the ingestion of millions of certificates. Founded by security researchers passionate about developing technology that provides anyone the power to fully understand their digital risk and exposure, Censys enables individuals, enterprises, and organizations to discover new information and insights as the Internet, IoT, and Cloud evolve. We are a true security startup with Midwestern roots, believing that a map of the Internet—or an organization’s assets—can quickly guide organizations to answers they need to protect themselves from vulnerability and risk.

About the role

We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the Data Collection team, which builds and operates the systems that discover, scan, and collect the Internet data powering the Censys Internet Map and our customer-facing products. The team includes engineers working across high-performance network scanning, protocol implementation, scan orchestration, real-time data pipelines and platforms, observability, and production operations. Its work directly affects the coverage, freshness, accuracy, reliability, and cost efficiency of the data our customers rely on.

This independent manager will own the team’s people leadership, technical roadmap, delivery, and operational health. You will partner with Product, Research, Security, Infrastructure, and other engineering teams to identify high-value investments and deliver them effectively. You should be technically credible and able to engage in architecture, design reviews, incidents, and engineering tradeoffs while enabling engineers.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a multidisciplinary engineering team, balancing people leadership, technical strategy, delivery, and operations.
• Set clear direction without needing to make every decision yourself.
• Coach through frequent feedback, meaningful delegation, and clear expectations.
• Use measurable outcomes such as coverage, freshness, accuracy, reliability, recovery time, and infrastructure efficiency to guide decisions.
• Balance speed, quality, cost, technical debt, operational risk, and customer impact.
• Believe engineering owns the full system lifecycle and works iteratively with Product and Research to solve ambiguous problems.
• Lead, coach, and develop Scanner Engineers and Distributed Systems Engineers.
• Set clear expectations for ownership, quality, collaboration, delivery, and operational responsibility.
• Provide timely feedback, create meaningful growth plans, and delegate ownership of systems, projects, and decisions.
• Build a healthy, accountable team; identify staffing needs; and maintain a high bar for hiring, onboarding, and performance management.
• Define the Data Collection roadmap with Product, Research, Infrastructure, and engineering stakeholders.
• Connect priorities to measurable improvements in data coverage, freshness, fidelity, reliability, scalability, and cost.
• Keep the team focused on the highest-value work while managing scope, dependencies, staffing, and risk.
• Lead major initiatives from discovery through production delivery, clearly communicating timelines, tradeoffs, and risks.
• Translate research and exploratory work into maintainable production capabilities when appropriate.
• Guide architecture across Internet scanning, orchestration, protocol implementations, distributed services, ingestion pipelines, APIs, and operational tooling.
• Establish standards for design, testing, rollout safety, observability, service ownership, and operational readiness.
• Be accountable for the quality, availability, maintainability, and cost efficiency of the team’s systems.
• Define and use metrics for scan execution, pipeline health, data freshness, protocol coverage, failure rates, and resource consumption.
• Support sustainable on-call and incident-management practices, ensuring follow-up addresses systemic causes.
• Identify architectural bottlenecks and strategic technical debt, evaluate the cost and benefit of addressing them, and recommend priorities.

Requirements

• Engineering management or team leadership experience (three years).
• A track record of leading a substantial technical initiative from planning through production delivery.
• Prior experience as a software or systems engineer building and operating production systems.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems and networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, and TLS.
• Experience with data-intensive systems such as streaming services, ingestion pipelines, message queues, databases, schedulers, or high-throughput APIs.
• Experience operating critical systems in production, including monitoring, incident response, capacity planning, and reliability improvement.
• The technical fluency to contribute to architecture discussions, assess implementation risks, and support complex incident analysis.
• Demonstrated success developing engineers through coaching, feedback, and delegation, including engineers with different specialties.
• Strong project-management and communication skills, with the ability to turn broad objectives into clear priorities, milestones, and outcomes.
• A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Skills

• Experience with Internet-scale scanning, network measurement, telemetry, security data, or distributed collection systems.
• Experience with Cloud stacks, like GCP or similar.
• Experience with streaming platforms or large-scale data stores such as Pub/Sub, Kafka, Bigtable, Spanner, or comparable technologies.
• A background in cybersecurity, Internet measurement, threat intelligence, security research, or productionizing research systems.

What Success Looks Like

• Establish a clear charter and roadmap aligned with company, product, research, and customer priorities.
• Build a cohesive team in which Scanner Engineers and Distributed Systems Engineers share ownership of end-to-end outcomes and grow into broader responsibilities.
• Deliver major initiatives that measurably improve data coverage, freshness, fidelity, reliability, scalability, or cost efficiency.
• Improve operational visibility, service ownership, incident practices, technical-debt management, and delivery predictability.

Pay

For high cost of living areas (San Francisco Bay, New York City, and Seattle), the expected salary range for this position is $174,000 USD - $218,000 USD, plus bonus eligibility and equity. For all other locations, the expected salary range for this position is $151,000 USD - $191,000 USD, plus bonus eligibility and equity. Job level and actual compensation will be decided based on factors including, but not limited to, individual qualifications objectively assessed during the interview process (including skills and prior relevant experience, potential impact, and scope of role), market demands, and specific work location. The listed range is a guideline, and the range for this role may be modified. For roles that are available to be filled remotely, the pay range is localized according to employee work location by a factor of between 83% and 100% of range.

Benefits

• Competitive benefits package including equity, health, dental & vision coverage, retirement with company contribution, parental leave, mental health & wellness benefits, flexible PTO, and a professional development stipend.
• Sales incentive pay for most sales roles and an annual bonus plan for eligible non-sales roles.