# Engineering Manager, Site Defense

**Company:** [Reddit](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/reddit)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Engineering Management
**Salary:** $217k – $304k/yr
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** Kubernetes, envoy, gRPC, cdn, DNS, load balancing, rate limiting, service discovery, Cloudflare, fastly, Go, Rust, Python
**Posted:** 2026-07-29

> Lead and grow Reddit's Site Defense and Transport teams, driving critical infrastructure migrations (Fastly to Cloudflare, Thrift to gRPC), expanding bot/DDoS defenses with ML-at-ingress, and maintaining high availability for one of the internet's largest sites. Requires 3+ years people management and 5+ years internet-scale infrastructure experience.

## Job Description

## How You'll Have Impact
- Complete Reddit's migration from Fastly to Cloudflare, including high-traffic properties such as reddit.com, media endpoints, Ads endpoints, e.reddit.com/gql-fed, devvit.reddit.com, and long-tail CDN traffic.
- Make Portal Transporter the predominant service discovery platform for Reddit, moving toward broad gRPC/xDS adoption and reducing fragmented service discovery.
- Migrate high-volume Thrift traffic to gRPC through TGRPC while preserving reliability, customer trust, and migration velocity.
- Reduce data transfer and cross-cluster networking costs through smarter routing, service discovery, and infrastructure standardization.
- Expand Site Defense coverage across post-CDN traffic, including TAC, RLS, TRS, Recaptcha, edge challenges, device attestation, IP reputation, and bot context.
- Deliver the Site Defense Platform and ML-at-ingress direction in a way that improves defense effectiveness while controlling false positives and preserving user experience.
- Operate merged Transport and Site Defense on-call responsibilities while protecting team focus, improving runbooks, cross-training engineers, and clarifying ownership boundaries with Site Experience SRE.
- Maintain high availability and low latency while performing large migrations on systems that sit directly in Reddit's request path.

## What You'll Do
- Lead, hire, onboard, and develop a high-caliber team of infrastructure engineers across Transport and Site Defense.
- Partner with senior ICs to define technical strategy for global traffic, edge/CDN, service discovery, gRPC datapath, rate limiting, site defense, and bot detection infrastructure.
- Drive multi-quarter execution on high-risk platform migrations, including CDN migration, inter-cluster load balancer adoption, Thrift to GRPC migration, and Site Defense Platform expansion.
- Establish clear priority frameworks that balance KTLO, roadmap commitments, incidents, business-critical migrations, and cross-functional asks.
- Build and maintain a healthy operational model for critical infrastructure, including on-call quality, SLOs, dashboards, incident response, postmortems, and proactive maintenance.
- Collaborate deeply with partner teams across Consumer, Ads, Media Platform, Graph QL, SEO, Web Platform, Info Sec, Compute, ML Platform, Storage, DevEx, Safety/Trust, CIAM, and Site Experience SRE.
- Coach engineers through technical design, stakeholder alignment, project planning, execution risk, communication, and career growth.
- Create a culture of metrics-driven quality, operational transparency, crisp ownership, and pragmatic technical ambition.

## Who You Might Be
- 3+ years of people-management experience for software, infrastructure, platform, SRE, or security/abuse-defense engineering teams.
- 5+ years of experience building or operating internet-scale infrastructure, distributed systems, networking, cloud platforms, service mesh, edge/CDN, or reliability-critical systems.
- Strong technical judgment in areas such as Kubernetes, Envoy, Contour, xDS, gRPC, CDNs, DNS, load balancing, cloud networking, rate limiting, service discovery, traffic routing, and observability.
- Experience managing operationally critical services, including: on-call, incident response, reliability review, SLOs, and production-change safety.
- Proven ability to lead large migrations or platform adoption efforts across many customer teams.
- Ability to partner with senior/staff engineers and translate between technical detail, user impact, team capacity, and executive-level risk.
- Strong communication, prioritization, and stakeholder-management skills.
- High empathy for engineers and internal customers, with the judgment to protect team focus while still serving the business.

## Nice To Have
- Experience with edge security, bot defense, DDoS mitigation, WAF, traffic reputation, Recaptcha/challenge systems, abuse detection, or fraud/risk infrastructure.
- Experience with Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, or similar CDN/edge providers.
- Experience with ML-enabled platform systems, online scoring, request annotation, signal pipelines, or false-positive-sensitive enforcement systems.
- Experience with cost optimization for large-scale cloud networking or service-to-service infrastructure.
- Hands-on software engineering experience in Go, Rust, Python, Java, C++, or similar production languages.

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