The team includes various 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.
The Job Is a Good Fit If You
Enjoy developing a multidisciplinary engineering team while balancing people leadership, technical strategy, delivery, and operations.
Can 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.
Are comfortable balancing 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.
What You’ll Do
Lead and Develop the Team
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.
Own the Roadmap and Delivery
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.
Provide Technical and Operational Leadership
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.
What You’ll Bring
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.
Things That Will Make You Stand Out
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
A successful Engineering Manager for Data Collection will
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.
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. Please discuss your specific work location with your recruiter for more information.
Censys offers a competitive benefits package to employees, including equity, health, dental & vision coverage, retirement with company contribution, parental leave, mental health & wellness benefits, flexible PTO, and a professional development stipend. Censys also offers sales incentive pay for most sales roles and an annual bonus plan for eligible non-sales roles. Censys’s compensation and benefits are subject to change and may be modified in the future. Please see our careers page for more details.
We will work to ensure individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to apply for a role, participate in the interview process, perform essential job functions, and receive other benefits and privileges of employment. If you require accommodation, please reach out to your recruiter. These modifications enable an individual with a disability to have an equal opportunity not only to get a job, but successfully perform their job tasks to the same extent as people without disabilities.
To ensure the integrity of our hiring process and facilitate a more personal connection, we require all candidates to keep their cameras on during video interviews. Additionally, if hired, we would love to bring you to our HQ in Ann Arbor for in-person onboarding.
By applying for this job, the candidate acknowledges and agrees that any personal data contained in their application or supporting materials will be processed in accordance with our Censys Privacy Policy.
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. We value diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Censys is an equal opportunity employer.
Note to external recruiters/agencies: We are not currently engaging with third-party agencies for this role and will not accept unsolicited outreach. We kindly ask that you do not submit resumes or candidate profiles to our team.
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