Staff Software Engineer - Site Defense
$217K–$304K
Remote - United States · Remote · Staff · Full-time · Posted Sep 2, 2026
- Experience
- 7+ years.
About the job
Designs and operates infrastructure that protects Reddit from DDoS attacks, bots, scraping, and other malicious traffic.
What you'll do
- Build high-scale, low-latency systems to detect, score, and mitigate malicious traffic in real time.
- Develop ingress-level defenses across CDN, edge, and internal infrastructure, including ML-at-Ingress initiatives.
- Own services end to end, participate in incident response, and mentor junior engineers.
What they ask for
- Experience building and operating high-throughput, low-latency production distributed systems.
- Software development experience in one or more general-purpose languages: Python, Go, Rust, Java, or C++.
- Experience building and maintaining distributed, fault-tolerant systems at scale.
- Experience with networking fundamentals, including HTTP, TLS, TCP/IP, proxies, CDNs, and load balancing; excellent communication skills.
Nice to have
- Experience with DDoS mitigation, WAFs, bot management, abuse prevention, anti-abuse frameworks, or browser fingerprinting.
- Familiarity with production ML systems, especially real-time inference or feature pipelines.
Pay
$217,000 — $303,900 USD (base salary)
Tools
Python, Go, Rust, Java, C++, HTTP, TLS, TCP/IP
AI focus
Contribute to ML-at-Ingress initiatives, including experimenting with models for traffic classification, bot detection, and anomaly detection.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative