Staff Software Engineer - Site Defense

Reddit, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 304,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

401k

Paid Time Off

Parental Leave

Job summary

Reddit, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Site Defense team within the Infrastructure organization.

You will design and own critical, high-throughput, low-latency systems that safeguard Reddit at internet scale from DDoS attacks, bot activity, and automated abuse. You will mentor junior engineers, contribute to ML-at-Ingress efforts, and collaborate with Security, Safety, and Infrastructure teams to balance security with performance and user experience.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience building and operating high throughput and low latency production distributed systems.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, Rust, Java or C++.
• Strong communication skills to collaborate across teams.
• Experience with distributed, fault-tolerant systems at scale.
• Solid understanding of 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 ingress defenses across CDN, edge, and internal layers.
• Build real-time detection and mitigation for malicious traffic per-request and per-user.
• Collaborate with Infrastructure, Security, and Safety teams to balance security with performance and user experience.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to ML-at-Ingress initiatives.

Skills

Python

Go

Rust

Java

C++

Distributed systems

Networking

Job description

Reddit is a community of communities. It's built on shared interests, passion, and trust, and is home to the most open and authentic conversations on the internet. Every day, Reddit users submit, vote, and comment on the topics they care most about. With 100,000+ active communities and approximately 130 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet's largest sources of information. For more information, visit www.redditinc.com.

Reddit's Transport and Site Defense teams build and operate foundational infrastructure behind one of the largest sites in the world. These teams own how requests enter Reddit, how services discover and talk to each other, how traffic moves across clusters and clouds, and how Reddit protects itself from DDoS attacks, scrapers, bots, and other undesired traffic.

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join the Site Defense team within Reddit's Infrastructure organization. Site Defense is responsible for protecting 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 is a high impact role that sits at the intersection of distributed systems, networking, security, and applied machine learning. You will design and own the critical infrastructure that safeguards Reddit's data from large scale attacks.

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

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 learn more, please visit https://www.redditinc.com/careers/.

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.

Reddit is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and is committed to building a workforce representative of the diverse communities we serve. Reddit is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If, due to a disability, you need an accommodation during the interview process, please let your recruiter know.