Staff Networking Engineer- SRE

Join the team turning internet intelligence into real-world security outcomes. Built on the world’s most comprehensive and accurate map of the Internet, the Censys Platform delivers real-time visibility and actionable intelligence needed to accelerate triage, investigate threats, hunt adversaries, and manage Internet exposure. We're trusted by half of the Fortune 500 and government agencies all around the world, and looking for people as passionate about the problems we're solving as we are.

At Censys, we’re on a mission to provide best in class internet visibility and intelligence to the global security community. Our platform helps security teams uncover hidden threats, gain actionable insights, and build proactive defense strategies. Trusted by organizations worldwide, Censys cuts through the noise to surface the most critical risks, enabling teams to respond faster, and stay ahead of attackers. We’re constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible to help our customers see and secure the internet more clearly than ever before.

Location: This position is remote within the United States.

Role Summary

Censys is seeking a Staff Networking Engineer-SRE to own networking across our hybrid infrastructure. Our platform scans the entire reachable internet from globally distributed data centers and serves that intelligence to customers in real time, which means the network is not a supporting layer for us, it is the product. We’re looking for an engineer who can set the technical direction for networking across data center, cloud, and edge environments, treat network infrastructure as software, and raise the reliability bar for every team that depends on it.

What You’ll Do

• Own the technical direction for networking across our hybrid environment, spanning data center fabrics, GCP VPC design, Kubernetes networking, and the edge that protects our public-facing platform
• Design and automate our core networking primitives (load balancing, ingress, routing, DNS, BGP peering, TLS termination) so that network changes ship through the same GitOps pipelines as application code
• Lead our cross-datacenter resiliency program for the on-premises scanning platform, including failover architecture and scan platform workloads across globally distributed data centers
• Own edge protection for a platform that both scans the internet and is highly visible on it, including DDoS mitigation, WAF strategy, and the traffic engineering that keeps scan and API infrastructure healthy
• Set networking and reliability standards for the teams that depend on the network, identify the architectural opportunities and technical debt worth addressing before they become liabilities, and get cross-team buy-in for multi-quarter infrastructure initiatives
• Act as a force multiplier for the SRE team, growing its networking depth through mentorship and durable engineering standards rather than becoming its single point of failure
• Stay hands-on, serving as a senior escalation point for complex cross-layer incidents spanning application, Kubernetes, and physical network layers

What You’ll Bring

• A positive attitude biased towards action and iterative problem solving, and a sense of ownership for the outcome of your work rather than the tasks assigned to you
• Deep networking fundamentals. TCP/IP, BGP, anycast, DNS, TLS, and load balancing at scale should be second nature, not reference material
• 10+ years of experience in network engineering, SRE, or infrastructure engineering, with a track record of owning networking in production and leading technical work across team boundaries
• Experience building software to run networks: automation services, health checking, certificate lifecycle management, and traffic management tooling written in a language like Go or Python, not just device configuration
• Experience operating hybrid environments that span physical data centers and public cloud (GCP preferred), including Kubernetes networking (CNI, ingress, service mesh)
• Fluency with infrastructure-as-code and GitOps workflows (Terraform, Crossplane, ArgoCD, or similar) applied to network infrastructure
• Demonstrated ability to drive architectural decisions across teams without formal authority, backed by clear written proposals and data
• Strong communication skills. Explaining a routing incident to leadership and a BCDR tradeoff to product management should both be comfortable territory

What Sets You Apart

• Experience running traffic management and delivery at large consumer scale (streaming, CDN, or global anycast footprints)
• A history of automating away toil that others accept as permanent, such as TLS certificate rotation, failover testing, or capacity forecasting
• Familiarity with internet measurement, scanning infrastructure, or the security domain, including how scan traffic interacts with peering relationships and abuse reporting
• Strong interest in harnessing AI and LLM tools as a force multiplier for infrastructure work, from incident analysis to configuration generation
• External knowledge sharing through conference talks, open-source contributions, or technical writing

For high cost of living areas (San Francisco Bay, New York City, and Seattle), the expected salary range for this position is $198,000 USD – $233,000 USD, plus bonus eligibility and equity.

For all other US locations, the expected salary range for this position is $172,000 USD – $216,000 USD, plus bonus eligibility and equity.

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.

This is a fully remote position within the United States.

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.

Identity Verification

As part of our hiring process, all candidates who receive an offer of employment will be asked to complete an identity verification through CLEAR.

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