Applied AI Engineer

Location: This position is remote within the United States.

Role Summary

Censys is seeking an Applied AI Engineer to join our Applied AI, Intelligence team. We sit at the intersection of Censys's world-class internet observation data and the frontier of agentic AI systems. This role exists to build the first generation of sensors that collect threat intelligence and create actionable, outcome-focused agentic workflows to act on internet-scale signals. We're looking for an engineer who brings genuine security domain depth and knows how to translate that into AI systems that actually work in production.

What You'll Do

• Design and lead the development of agentic workflows that reason over Censys internet scan data to surface threats, classify behaviors, and accelerate analyst workflows
• Architect and build Censys's first generation of AI-native internet collection infrastructure, leveraging historical observation data to create adaptive, high-fidelity sensors with advanced detection capabilities
• Apply Censys's historical scan datasets as grounding context for agentic decision-making, threat classification, and pipeline optimization
• Partner with Security Research and LLM Engineers to translate domain expertise into training signals, evals, and workflow requirements
• Create and maintain technical documentation for agentic systems, sensor architectures, and LLM integration patterns so the team can build on your work

What You'll Bring

• A bias toward action and iterative problem solving. You'd rather ship a rough version and learn from it than wait for perfect requirements
• Deep familiarity with how the internet works at a technical level: scanning, protocols, packet capture, exploit behavior, and the signals that separate malicious traffic from benign noise
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with meaningful time spent in security research, detection engineering, or threat intelligence
• Experience with Golang in a production engineering context
• Demonstrated ability to design, evaluate, and systematically iterate on LLM behavior in production contexts — including building eval sets, identifying failure modes, and tuning decision-making pipelines against measurable outcomes rather than intuition
• Experience working with large, unstructured datasets and designing systems that process them reliably
• Strong written communication skills. You can write a technical design doc, explain a detection hypothesis to an analyst, and brief a non-technical stakeholder without losing the thread for either audience

What Sets You Apart

• Prior experience building and operating large scale internet collection infrastructure, dynamic personas, or deception-based detection systems
• Experience building multi-step LLM pipelines — with or without orchestration frameworks — and clear opinions about where abstractions help versus where they introduce brittleness you can't afford in production systems
• Familiarity with detection rule development (Suricata, Sigma, YARA) and how detection logic translates into actionable signals
• Prior work you can speak to in depth: a detection system, a research finding, a dataset analysis, or a tool — whether published or internal
• Hands-on experience working with internet-scale telemetry — scan data, banner grabs, certificate datasets, passive DNS, or similar — including the messiness of normalizing and reasoning over it at volume

Compensation

For high cost of living areas (San Francisco Bay area, Seattle, or New York City metro), the expected salary range for this position is $171,000 - $203,000 USD, plus bonus eligibility and equity.

For all other US locations, the expected salary range for this position is $150,000 - $188,000 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.