Staff Software Engineer - Site Defense
Design and operate distributed, low-latency infrastructure that protects Reddit from DDoS attacks, bots, scraping, and other network threats. The role requires 7+ years of distributed-systems experience plus expertise in security, networking, and production operations.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate high-scale, low-latency systems that protect Reddit from DDoS attacks, bots, and automated abuse.
- Analyze, develop, and evolve ingress-level defenses across CDN, edge, and internal infrastructure layers.
- Build systems to detect, score, and mitigate malicious traffic in real time at per-request and per-user granularity.
- Collaborate with Infrastructure, Security, and Safety teams to balance security, performance, and user experience.
- Mentor junior engineers.
- Contribute to ML-at-ingress initiatives, including traffic classification, bot detection, and anomaly detection models.
- Own services end to end, including design, implementation, on-call, and operational excellence.
- Participate in incident response and post-incident analysis for large-scale network or abuse events.
Requirements
- 7+ years of experience building and operating high-throughput, low-latency production distributed systems.
- Software development experience in one or more general-purpose programming languages, including Python, Go, Rust, Java, or C++.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
- Experience with DDoS mitigation, WAFs, bot management, or abuse prevention systems.
- Experience with networking fundamentals, including HTTP, TLS, TCP/IP, proxies, CDNs, and load balancing.
Nice to Have
- Experience with anti-abuse frameworks and bot scoring, such as ReCaptcha, DataDome, or Turnstile.
- Experience with browser fingerprinting frameworks, such as FingerprintJS or ThumbmarkJS.
- Familiarity with production ML systems, especially real-time inference or feature pipelines.
Compensation
- Base salary range: $217,000–$303,900 USD.
- Eligible for equity in the form of restricted stock units.
- Comprehensive healthcare and income replacement programs.
- 401(k) with employer match.
- Global benefits supporting workspace, professional development, and caregiving.
- Family planning support.
- Gender-affirming care.
- Mental health and coaching benefits.
- Flexible vacation and paid volunteer time off.
- Paid parental leave.
Skills
Distributed Systems, Python, Go, Rust, Java, C++, Ddos Mitigation, Web Application Firewall, Bot Management, Http, Tls, TCP/IP, Cdns, Load Balancing, Machine Learning
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