The company is run by an inner circle of middle management who will bad mouth anyone not in the room, including the CEO and CTO.
There are a million "hey what if we tried this" conversations alongside a full prioritized workload, and if you don't get them all done, expect a "Meets Expectations" performance review followed by a Performance Improvement Plan a few weeks later.
This company stays in business because of the heroic efforts of a small few talented jerks. If you join, do your best to buddy up to these jerks or you'll be out within the year.
Most of management has been promoted up to the point of incompetence. It's easy to spot the managers who probably were good engineers, but are completely failing to now manage others.
Turnover is very high. In my time there I saw a handful of people join and quit within a month for similar reasons. Product has no freedom to design a good product, and engineering managers don't get to execute on those products. The vast majority of work being done is either KTLO work or tracking down a POC for the CEO.
The culture is completely toxic. Whoever is not in the room is being bad mouthed. Engineers have "blacklisted" several other engineers and researchers from contributing to shared code bases, rather than providing guidance and feedback.
Engineering managers will openly complain that product managers are never around, that the CTO just wants to shove AI everywhere into the product, and that the research team does half-assed work.
This company is a massive wasted opportunity. The space they are in and the work to be done are extremely exciting, however that will need to be accomplished by someone else as the people running Censys will not be able to get the job done.