Senior Security Researcher

Company Background

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.

As a Principal Security Researcher, you’ll have the opportunity to work at the intersection of large-scale internet measurement, advanced threat research, and real-world cybersecurity events. Our research doesn't just advance academic knowledge—it’s leveraged to directly protect enterprise customers and support critical national security initiatives. You'll collaborate with world-class researchers, engineers, and product teams while having the freedom to pursue ambitious research projects that push the boundaries of what's possible in cybersecurity. With our strong partnerships across government and commercial sectors, your work will have immediate real-world application and visibility at the highest levels of the security community.

We're looking for a Security Researcher with deep, hands-on offensive security experience — penetration testing, red teaming, adversary emulation, CNO — to join our Research team, known as ARC. This is a role that generates original, attacker's-eye insight and turns it into both product capability and public research.You'll work at the intersection of three things: how real attackers operate, what that means for how Censys should scan, fingerprint, and characterize the Internet, and how to communicate that to both engineering teams and the broader security community.

This position is located remotely with no expectation to work from a Censys office. This position is also expected to travel once per quarter for industry events and team onsites.

• Drive product capability. Bring an offensive practitioner's perspective to Censys's scanning, fingerprinting, and attack surface data. Identify gaps in detection logic, protocol coverage, and vulnerability signals that only someone who has actually broken into networks would notice.

• Conduct original research. Investigate emerging attack techniques, exploitation trends, C2 infrastructure, and adversary tradecraft using Internet-wide scan data and your own testing methodology.

• Publish seminal work. Produce research reports, technical blog posts, and conference-caliber material (DEF CON, Black Hat, BSides, etc.) that establishes Censys as an authoritative voice in offensive security.

• Collaborate cross-functionally. Partner with Engineering and Product to translate research findings into new scanning modules, fingerprints, risk indicators, and detection features.

• Lead agentic AI threat research. Build, deploy, and evaluate agentic AI frameworks — autonomous penetration testing agents, LLM-powered vulnerability research tools, multi-agent swarms — both as tradecraft research (i.e., “how do attackers use these tools”) and as Censys product capability (i.e., “how do we detect that adversaries are using them”). Where AI-assisted vulnerability discovery shows promise, determine what Censys’ scanning and fingerprinting posture should be for the signals those tools leave behind.

• Track adversary infrastructure. Use red team and pentest tradecraft knowledge to identify how threat actors stand up, configure, and hide infrastructure — and encode that knowledge into repeatable detection logic.

• Mentor and inform. Act as an internal subject-matter expert on offensive techniques, helping other researchers and engineers reason about attacker behavior.

• Demonstrates curiosity, a willingness to