Staff Software Engineer - Site Defense

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate high-scale, low-latency systems protecting Reddit from DDoS attacks, bots, and automated abuse.
• Develop and evolve ingress-level defenses across CDN, edge, and internal infrastructure layers.
• Build real-time systems that detect, score, and mitigate malicious traffic at per-request and per-user granularity.
• Collaborate with Infrastructure, Security, and Safety teams to balance security, performance, and user experience.
• Contribute to ML-at-Ingress initiatives for traffic classification, bot detection, and anomaly detection.
• 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 and abuse events.
• Mentor junior engineers in their professional growth.

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++.
• Experience with DDoS mitigation, WAFs, bot management, or abuse prevention systems.
• Experience with networking fundamentals including TLS, TCP/IP, proxies, CDNs, and load balancing.
• Excellent communication skills for collaboration in a service-oriented team and company.
• Nice to have experience with anti-abuse frameworks and bot scores such as ReCaptcha, Datadome, or Turnstile.
• Nice to have experience with browser fingerprinting frameworks such as fingerprintJS or ThumbmarkJS.
• Familiarity with production ML systems, especially real-time inference or feature pipelines.

Benefits

• Comprehensive healthcare benefits 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.
• Generous paid parental leave.
• Remote position as indicated by the #LI-Remote designation.
• Eligible for equity in the form of restricted stock units and, depending on the position offered, potentially commission.
• Base salary range of $217,000–$303,900 USD.