Staff Site Defense Engineer (DDoS & Bot Mitigation)

AI Chopping Block; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 217,000 - 304,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare benefits

401k with employer match

Global benefits programs

Family planning support

Gender-affirming care

Mental health & coaching

Flexible vacation & volunteer time off

Parental leave

Job summary

Reddit is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Site Defense team within its Infrastructure organization. You will design and own critical, low-latency defenses protecting Reddit from DDoS, bots, and automated abuse at internet scale.

You will mentor engineers, contribute to ML-at-Ingress initiatives, and own end-to-end services, from design to on-call, balancing security with performance and user experience.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building and operating high-throughput distributed systems.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, Rust, Java, or C++.
• Strong communication skills to collaborate with a service-oriented team.

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.
• Mentor junior engineers in their professional growth.
• Own services end-to-end, including design, implementation, on-call, and operational excellence.

Skills

Distributed systems

Python

Go

Rust

Java

DDoS mitigation

Tools

WAFs

CDN

Bot management

Job description

Reddit is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Site Defense team within its Infrastructure organization. You will design and own critical, low-latency defenses protecting Reddit from DDoS, bots, and automated abuse at internet scale.

You will mentor engineers, contribute to ML-at-Ingress initiatives, and own end-to-end services, from design to on-call, balancing security with performance and user experience.