Staff Software Engineer - Site Defense
Reddit · Remote - United States
About this role
**Staff Software Engineer - Site Defense** **About the Role:** Join Reddit's Site Defense team within the Infrastructure organization. Site Defense protects Reddit at internet scale, serving as the first line of defense against DDoS attacks, automated abuse, large-scale scraping, and other network-level threats. This high-impact role sits at the intersection of distributed systems, networking, security, and applied machine learning. **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 Safety teams to balance security, performance, and user experience • Mentor junior engineers in their professional growth • Contribute to ML-at-Ingress initiatives, including 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 Python, Go, Rust, Java, or C++ • Excellent communication skills for service-oriented collaboration • Experience with DDoS mitigation, WAFs, bot management, or abuse prevention systems • Experience with networking fundamentals (HTTP, TLS, TCP/IP, proxies, CDNs, load balancing) **Nice to have:** • Experience with anti-abuse frameworks and bot scores • Experience with browser fingerprinting frameworks • Familiarity with ML systems in production, especially real-time inference or feature pipelines **Compensation & Benefits:** Base Salary: $217,000 – $303,900 USD • Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs • 401(k) with Employer Match • Global Benefit programs including professional development and caregiving support • Family Planning Support and Gender-Affirming Care • Mental Health & Coaching Benefits • Flexible Vacation & Paid Volunteer Time Off • Generous Paid Parental Leave **Location:** Remote
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