About The Company
Reddit is a vibrant community of communities, built on shared interests, passions, and trust. It serves as one of the most open and authentic platforms for conversation on the internet, where users submit, vote, and comment on topics they care most about. With over 100,000 active communities and approximately 130 million daily active visitors, Reddit stands as one of the largest sources of information on the web. The company's mission is to foster meaningful connections and authentic discussions, making it a unique space for diverse voices and ideas. For more information, visit www.redditinc.com.
About The Role
Reddit's Transport and Site Defense teams are responsible for building and maintaining the foundational infrastructure that supports the security and performance of one of the world's largest websites. These teams oversee how requests enter Reddit, facilitate service discovery and communication across clusters and clouds, and implement robust defenses against DDoS attacks, scrapers, bots, and other malicious traffic. We are seeking a highly skilled Staff Software Engineer to join the Site Defense team within Reddit’s Infrastructure organization. This role is critical in safeguarding Reddit’s data and ensuring the platform's resilience at internet scale. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in distributed systems, networking, security, and machine learning, and will be instrumental in designing and owning infrastructure that defends against large-scale network threats.
Qualifications
- 7+ years of experience in building and operating high throughput, low latency distributed systems.
- Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Python, Go, Rust, Java, or C++.
- Strong understanding of networking fundamentals including HTTP, TLS, TCP/IP, proxies, CDNs, and load balancing.
- Experience with DDoS mitigation, Web Application Firewalls (WAFs), bot management, or abuse prevention systems.
- Excellent communication skills to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams.
- Experience in incident response and post-incident analysis for large-scale network or abuse events.
- Ability to mentor junior engineers and contribute to team growth.
- Experience with machine learning systems, especially in real-time inference or feature pipelines, is a plus.
- Knowledge of anti-abuse frameworks and bot scoring mechanisms such as ReCaptcha, Datadome, or Turnstile is desirable.
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and operate high-scale, low-latency systems to protect Reddit from DDoS attacks, bots, and automated abuse.
- Analyze and enhance ingress-level defenses across CDN, edge, and internal infrastructure layers.
- Build real-time systems to detect, score, and mitigate malicious traffic at per-request and per-user granularity.
- Collaborate closely with Infrastructure, Security, and Safety teams to balance security measures with platform performance and user experience.
- Mentor and guide junior engineers, fostering professional growth and technical excellence.
- Contribute to ML initiatives related to traffic classification, bot detection, and anomaly detection, including experimenting with models and pipelines.
- Own end-to-end services, including system design, implementation, operational management, and on-call responsibilities.
- Participate in incident response activities and conduct post-incident reviews to improve system resilience.
Benefits
- Comprehensive healthcare benefits including medical, dental, and vision insurance.
- Income replacement programs to support your well-being.
- 401(k) plan with employer matching contributions.
- Global benefits programs tailored to support work-life balance, professional development, and caregiving needs.
- Family planning support services.
- Mental health resources and coaching benefits.
- Paid time off for vacation, parental leave, and other personal needs.
Equal Opportunity
Reddit is proud to be an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce. We believe that a variety of perspectives and experiences enrich our community and workplace. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds, identities, and abilities, and provide reasonable accommodations during the hiring process for qualified individuals with disabilities or disabled veterans. Our goal is to ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to contribute and succeed at Reddit.
US
