Engineering Manager, Data Collection
Job Description
Key Skills Required
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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.
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Censys
View Company ProfileCensys is a premier, enterprise-grade attack surface management and threat intelligence powerhouse engineered to orchestrate massive-scale internet scanning pipelines and intelligent, continuous asset discovery platforms. Operating as a trailblazer in outside-in digital risk monitoring, the company eliminates the operational friction of shadow IT and unmonitored infrastructure—which frequently suffers from rogue cloud deployments, exposed database ports, and unpatched perimeter vulnerabilities—by seamlessly deploying dynamic internet-wide telemetry, automated device fingerprinting, and global port probing. Moving beyond point-in-time security audits and reactive exposure logging, Censys empowers SecOps teams, threat researchers, and Fortune 500 enterprises to dynamically surface, contextualize, and remediate unknown internet-facing assets with elite, scalable, and audit-ready precision. Under the hood, its sophisticated proprietary operational infrastructure—bolstered by its high-performance ZMap network scanning heritage, real-time certificate graph mapping, and threat hunting search APIs—natively manages global IPv4/IPv6 address monitoring, host configuration analysis, and cloud asset mapping workflows, providing the necessary foundation for proactive cybersecurity defense. What sets Censys apart is its uncompromising dedication to comprehensive raw visibility; by bridging the gap between raw global internet telemetry and actionable enterprise threat intelligence, the organization enables security leaders to radically reduce external attack surfaces, neutralize critical exposures before exploitation, and build an unassailable foundation for global digital risk management.
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