Staff Site Defense Engineer – DDoS & ML-Driven Ingress

Reddit, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 217,000 - 304,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare benefits

401k with employer match

Global benefit programs

Family planning support

Mental health & coaching

Job summary

Reddit is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Site Defense team within its Infrastructure organization. You will design and own critical infrastructure to safeguard Reddit’s data from large-scale network and abuse threats, operating at internet scale.

You will mentor engineers, contribute to ML-driven ingress defenses, and partner with Security and Safety teams to balance security with performance and user experience.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience building and operating high throughput distributed systems.
• Proficiency in one or more general purpose programming languages: Python, Go, Rust, Java, C++.
• Excellent communication skills for a service-oriented team.
• Experience with DDoS mitigation, WAFs, bot management, or abuse prevention systems.
• Experience with networking fundamentals (HTTP, TLS, TCP/IP, proxies, CDNs, load balancing).

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.
• Partner with Infrastructure, Security, and Safety teams to balance security, performance, and user experience.
• Mentor junior engineers in their professional growth.
• Contribute to ML-at-Ingress initiatives with traffic classification and anomaly detection models.
• 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.

Skills

Distributed systems

DDoS mitigation

Networking fundamentals

Python

Go

Rust

Java

C++

Tools

ReCaptcha

Datadome

Turnstile

Job description

Reddit is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Site Defense team within its Infrastructure organization. You will design and own critical infrastructure to safeguard Reddit’s data from large-scale network and abuse threats, operating at internet scale.

You will mentor engineers, contribute to ML-driven ingress defenses, and partner with Security and Safety teams to balance security with performance and user experience.