Security Engineer (Python)

Censys maps the internet. Our customers rely on us for the exposure and threat intelligence that shapes their security programs — which means the bar for our own security is not theoretical. You'll help set it.

This is a senior, high-ownership role on a small team. You will own the identity program, cloud security posture, and vulnerability management end to end, serve as a core incident responder, and build the automation — increasingly agentic — that enables our team to operate at the scale of a much larger one. You'll also be one of our most direct users of our own product: monitoring Censys's external attack surface with Censys is part of the job.

We're looking for someone well-rounded rather than narrowly specialized, who is energized by AI and wants to build with it, and who is comfortable deciding what matters most when everything looks urgent.

What You’ll Do:

• Identity & Access Management Own identity as a program, not a ticket queue. Drive down standing access and manual provisioning over time for joiner-mover-leaver changes and non-human identity management.
• Cloud Security (GCP-first) Harden and continuously improve our cloud-native environment: organization policy, IAM least privilege, service account and workload identity hygiene, network segmentation, secrets management, and posture monitoring. Partner with SRE on infrastructure-as-code guardrails so security is enforced at build time, not discovered later.
• Vulnerability Management Own the program: asset coverage, risk-based prioritization that weighs real exploitability and exposure rather than raw CVSS, defensible SLAs, hands-on partnership with engineering on remediation, and reporting leadership can act on. Use Censys to keep an outside-in view of our own attack surface.
• Detection & Incident Response Build detection coverage for identity, cloud, and SaaS. Share in the security escalation rotation, lead or co-lead high-severity incidents, run blameless post-incident reviews, and turn findings into durable fixes. Maintain runbooks and run tabletops that are actually exercised.
• AI and Agentic Security Two halves, both yours:
• Securing our AI footprint. Non-human and agent identity, MCP server and tool-permission scoping, secrets handling for autonomous workflows, data-flow review for AI-enabled features, untrusted-input and prompt-injection boundaries, and security review of AI tooling adopted across the company.
• Building with agents. Design and ship agentic security workflows — alert triage and enrichment, evidence collection, access review orchestration, phishing response, posture drift detection — that measurably reduce manual toil.
• Security Automation and Slack-Native Operations Censys runs on Slack. Security should meet people where they already work: ChatOps-driven requests and approvals, self-service paths that are easier than the insecure alternative, and automation over documentation wherever possible.

Scope note: Application and product security are owned by our SRE team. You'll partner closely with them on cloud and infrastructure guardrails and contribute security expertise to their work — but you are not expected to own the SDLC or product security roadmap.

What You’ll Bring:

• 5+ years in security engineering, with real depth in at least two of: identity and access management, cloud security, vulnerability management, detection and response.
• Hands-on identity operations experience — SSO/SAML/OIDC, MFA and conditional access, device trust, lifecycle automation. Direct Duo and Google Workspace experience is a significant advantage.
• Experience securing cloud-first or cloud-native environments. GCP preferred; strong AWS or Azure background with genuine interest in going deep on GCP works.
• Scripting and automation ability — Python, Go, or similar — sufficient to build tooling and API integrations, not only to configure vendor products.
• Incident response experience as a primary responder or lead on high-severity incidents, including post-incident analysis.
• Genuine enthusiasm for AI, and hands-on experience building with LLMs or agent frameworks (professional, open source, or personal projects all count).
• Working familiarity with a prescriptive control framework — ISO 27XXX, CMMC, FedRAMP — and the judgment to implement controls as engineering rather than paperwork.
• Comfort operating with ambiguity on a lean team: you can prioritize independently, say no with a reason, and finish things.
• Strong written communication for an async, Slack-heavy environment.

Bonus Points:

• Deep GCP expertise: organization policies, VPC Service Controls, workload identity federation, custom org constraints.
• Experience securing or building agentic systems, MCP servers, or AI-enabled products.
• Detection engineering and SIEM or data-pipeline experience.
• Prior experience on a security team at a security product company.
• Direct experience taking an organization through CMMC assessment or a FedRAMP authorization, including boundary definition and continuous monitoring.
• SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, or GDPR experience and how it intersects with engineering practice.
• Defining and reporting security metrics to executive stakeholders.
• Open source contributions, published research, tooling, advisories, or conference talks.
• Relevant certifications such as GCP Professional Cloud Security Engineer, GIAC (GCFA, GCDA, GCSA), or OSCP.