Welcome to the 2027 Censys Internship Application!

What we're looking for

• Graduation dates 2027 through 2029
• Undergrad (preference for juniors and seniors, Master's, Ph.D.
• Open to H-1B, OPT, CPT, and F-1 visa candidates
• Passion for cybersecurity
• Thrives in a startup environment

AI/LLM Engineering Intern

Previous internships worked directly on the Censys Assistant — a live product already handling 35,000+ conversations and 125,000+ messages. This is not a research sandbox. Past projects have included migrating every agent in the pipeline onto our internal model gateway, building the evaluation system that turns real production traces into automated quality judges, and shipping new tool integrations (like Active DNS lookups) straight into the Assistant's agent pipeline. You'll get hands-on with LLM orchestration frameworks like LangGraph/LangChain, prompt and context engineering, retrieval and tool-use design, and agent evaluation — the full discipline of building reliable systems on top of language models, not just calling an API.

What to expect: Ownership of a real service from day one — you'll write code that runs in production, sit in on the same review and UAT process as full-time engineers, and work across research, ops, and platform teams to get unblocked.

Why Censys: Most AI internships are prompt-engineering exercises on top of someone else's product. Here, you're building the infrastructure and measurement systems for an LLM-powered product with real customer traffic, backed by a genuinely unique data asset — Censys's internet-scale scan corpus — that most companies simply don't have.

Frontend Engineering Intern

You'll build the interfaces that customers and internal teams rely on to make sense of internet-scale data — from React component architecture down to how state, caching, and real-time updates work against a strongly-typed Go/gRPC backend. Recent work has included a user preferences service (solving flash-of-default-content issues with proto-backed, cross-device SSR storage) and a full CLI feature surface for tag management built over our generated SDK, shipped in reviewable, independently-tested increments.

What to expect: Deep, focused frontend ownership — component design, data modeling for the UI layer, performance and rendering tradeoffs, and close collaboration with the backend engineers whose APIs you consume, so you understand not just how to build a UI but why it's shaped the way it is.

Why Censys: You're not building generic CRUD screens — you're designing interfaces for making massive, complex security datasets legible and actionable, with real customers depending on the product every day.

ML/DS Intern

Censys generates one of the largest internet-scan datasets in existence, and our ML/DS team turns that raw signal into product features: fingerprinting, service/device classification, anomaly and threat scoring, and the models behind our State of the Internet research. You'll work with BigQuery and the Censys platform to explore internet-scale datasets, build and evaluate models against real production data (not toy benchmarks), and work alongside research and engineering teams to get findings into shippable features.

What to expect: End-to-end model work — framing the problem, exploring data at internet scale, building and evaluating a model, and understanding what it takes to get a model from a notebook into something the platform actually uses.

Why Censys: Very few companies have internet-wide scan data to train and evaluate against. If you want to work on classification and detection problems at a scale most ML teams never see, this is a rare place to do it.

Software Engineering Intern, Scanning

You'll work on the scan engine itself — the software that continuously discovers, probes, and fingerprints services across the entire internet. Past contributions include building brand-new protocol scanners from scratch (adding tens of thousands of newly-discovered hosts to our dataset) and adding post-quantum cryptography detection to our open-source TLS library. You'll work in Go, writing and testing protocol modules that feed directly into the data pipeline the rest of Censys's product is built on.

What to expect: Low-level, high-leverage engineering — every protocol module you ship changes what shows up in the dataset for every downstream team and customer, so correctness and performance both matter.

Why Censys: This is about as close as you'll get to building the internet's index. Few companies operate scanning infrastructure at this scale, and as an intern you'll ship code that directly expands what the entire platform can see.

Backend/Distributed Systems Engineer Intern

Censys's core product is built on internet-scale scanning infrastructure, and interns work directly on it. Past contributions include building brand-new protocol scanners from scratch (adding tens of thousands of newly-discovered hosts to our dataset), adding post-quantum cryptography detection to our open-source TLS library, and building out OAuth2/service-account infrastructure and tag systems that directly support enterprise customers at multi-million-dollar ARR scale. You'll work in Go, gRPC, Protobuf, Spanner, Kubernetes, Argo CD, and Temporal — the actual tools running our production infrastructure.

What to expect: Systems-level thinking at internet scale — reliability, migrations (e.g., ingress/networking changes across live services), and coordination with ops and infrastructure teams whose systems you depend on and affect.

Why Censys: Few companies operate infrastructure that scans and indexes the entire internet. If you want to work on distributed systems problems that are actually large-scale — not simulated — this is a rare place to do it as an intern, with direct visibility into how your work affects real enterprise customers.

Security Research Intern

You'll conduct original internet security research using Censys's scan data — not shadow a senior researcher, but own a research question end to end. Past work has included shipping new fingerprints that expanded scan coverage across 15M+ installations, publishing public research (picked up by outlets including Cybernews, Security Online, and TipRanks), and contributing findings to Censys's State of the Internet Report. Interns work with BigQuery and the Censys platform directly to scope internet-wide datasets, identify novel threats, and turn findings into public-facing writing.

What to expect: Ownership of an open-ended research question — you'll form a hypothesis, mine internet-scale scan data to test it, and turn what you find into a piece of public research that carries the Censys name.

Why Censys: Very few organizations have visibility into the entire internet's attack surface. This is a chance to do original security research at a scale and with a dataset that's genuinely rare outside of a company like Censys — and to see your findings picked up by industry press.

If you're interested in being considered, please apply to the role or roles you are interested in. We will be reviewing applications as soon as possible and will reach out in the coming weeks with feedback and/or next steps. Our decision timeline to extend offers is by December 2026.