Reddit is hiring a Senior Software Engineer for its Site Defense team to protect our platform at internet scale. You'll be responsible for defending Reddit from DDoS attacks, automated abuse, scraping, and network-level threats by designing and operating critical infrastructure that spans distributed systems, networking, security, and applied machine learning.
What You'll Do
- 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.
What We're Looking For
- 5+ 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 with DDoS mitigation, WAFs, bot management, or abuse prevention systems.
- Experience with networking fundamentals (HTTP, TLS, TCP/IP, proxies, CDNs, load balancing).
Nice to Have
- Prior experience with cloud infrastructure systems (Kubernetes, AWS / GCE ecosystems).
- Familiarity with ML systems in production, especially real-time inference or feature pipelines.
- Knowledge of traffic analysis, anomaly detection, or large-scale telemetry systems.
Technical Stack
- Languages: Python, Go, Rust, Java, C++
- Infrastructure: Kubernetes, AWS, GCE
Team & Environment
The Site Defense team operates within Reddit’s Infrastructure organization.
Benefits & Compensation
- Compensation: $190,800 - $267,100 USD + equity: Eligible to receive equity in the form of restricted stock units.
- 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.
Work Mode
This is a remote position open to candidates in the United States.
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.
