Staff Software Engineer: Site Defense & Ingress

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, 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.