Staff Software Engineer - Site Defense

You will

• 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
• Partner closely within Infrastructure and with Security, and internal Safety teams to balance security, performance, and user experience
• Mentor junior engineers in their professional growth.
• Contribute to the team's ML-at-Ingress initiatives, including experimenting with models 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 or abuse events

You have

• 7+ years of experience building and operating high throughput and low latency production distributed systems.
• Software development experience in one or more general purpose programming languages; Python, Go, Rust, Java, C++.
• Excellent communication skills to collaborate with a service-oriented team and company.
• Experience building and maintaining distributed, fault-tolerant distributed systems at scale
• Experience with networking fundamentals (HTTP, TLS, TCP/IP, proxies, CDNs, load balancing).

Nice to have

• Experience with DDoS mitigation, WAFs, bot management, or abuse prevention systems.
• Experience with anti-abuse frameworks and bot scores (ReCaptcha, Datadome, Turnstile)
• Experience with browser fingerprinting frameworks (fingerprintJS, ThumbmarkJS)
• Familiarity with ML systems in production, especially real-time inference or feature pipelines.

Benefits

• Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs
• 401k with Employer Match
• Global Benefit programs that fit your lifestyle, from workspace to professional development to caregiving support
• Family Planning Support
• Gender-Affirming Care
• Mental Health & Coaching Benefits
• Flexible Vacation & Paid Volunteer Time Off
• Generous Paid Parental Leave

#LI-Remote

Pay Transparency

This job posting may span more than one career level.

In addition to base salary, this job is eligible to receive equity in the form of restricted stock units, and depending on the position offered, it may also be eligible to receive a commission. Additionally, Reddit offers a wide range of benefits to U.S.-based employees, including medical, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) program with employer match, generous time off for vacation, and parental leave.

To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share base salary ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. We set standard base pay ranges for all roles based on function, level, and country location, benchmarked against similar stage growth companies. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including, skills, depth of work experience and relevant licenses/credentials, and may vary from the amounts listed below.

The base salary range for this position is: $217,000—$303,900 USD

In select roles and locations, the interviews will be recorded, transcribed and summarized by artificial intelligence (AI). You will have the opportunity to opt out of recording, transcription and summarization prior to any scheduled interviews.

During the interview, we will collect the following categories of personal information: Identifiers, Professional and Employment-Related Information, Sensory Information (audio/video recording), and any other categories of personal information you choose to share with us. We will use this information to evaluate your application for employment or an independent contractor role, as applicable.

We will not sell your personal information or disclose it to any third party for their marketing purposes. We will delete any recording of your interview promptly after making a hiring decision. For more information about how we will handle your personal information, including our retention of it, please refer to our Candidate Privacy Policy for Potential Employees and Contractors.