Staff Software Engineer - Site Defense (Cybersecurity)

Location: Remote - United States

Base salary: $217,000–$303,900 USD per year, plus potential equity and commission depending on the position offered.

Company

Reddit operates a large-scale community platform with more than 100,000 active communities and approximately 130 million daily active unique visitors.

What you will do

• Design, build, and operate high-scale, low-latency systems protecting Reddit from DDoS attacks, bots, and automated abuse.
• Develop 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 with Infrastructure, Security, and Safety teams to balance protection, performance, and user experience.
• Contribute to ML-at-Ingress initiatives involving traffic classification, bot detection, anomaly detection, and real-time inference.
• Own services end to end, including design, implementation, on-call operations, incident response, and post-incident analysis; mentor junior engineers.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience building and operating high-throughput, low-latency production distributed systems.
• Experience with fault-tolerant distributed systems at scale.
• Software development experience in Python, Go, Rust, Java, or C++.
• Knowledge of networking fundamentals, including HTTP, TLS, TCP/IP, proxies, CDNs, and load balancing.
• Strong communication skills for collaboration across service-oriented teams.
• Must be based in the United States.

Nice to have

• Experience with DDoS mitigation, WAFs, bot management, or abuse prevention systems.
• Experience with anti-abuse frameworks and bot scoring tools such as ReCaptcha, Datadome, or Turnstile.
• Experience with browser fingerprinting frameworks such as fingerprintJS or ThumbmarkJS.
• Familiarity with production machine learning systems, especially real-time inference or feature pipelines.

Culture & Benefits

• Comprehensive healthcare benefits and income replacement programs.
• 401(k) with employer match.
• Benefits supporting workspace needs, professional development, caregiving, family planning, gender-affirming care, and mental health.
• Flexible vacation, paid volunteer time off, and generous paid parental leave.
• Interviews may be recorded, transcribed, and summarized by AI in select roles; candidates can opt out before scheduled interviews.