Staff Software Engineer - Site Defense (Cybersecurity)

Location: Remote - United States

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

Company

Reddit operates a large 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 that 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, and anomaly detection.
• Own services through 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.
• Software development experience in Python, Go, Rust, Java, C++, or another general-purpose programming language.
• Experience with DDoS mitigation, WAFs, bot management, or abuse prevention systems.
• Knowledge of networking fundamentals, including HTTP, TLS, TCP/IP, proxies, CDNs, and load balancing.
• Excellent communication skills for collaboration across service-oriented teams.
• Must be based in the United States; the role is remote within the US.

Nice to have

• 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 ML systems, particularly real-time inference or feature pipelines.

Culture & Benefits

• Comprehensive healthcare and income replacement programs.
• 401(k) with employer match.
• Global benefits supporting workspace, professional development, caregiving, and family planning.
• Gender-affirming care, mental health, and coaching benefits.
• Flexible vacation, paid volunteer time off, and generous paid parental leave.

Hiring process

• Some interviews may be recorded, transcribed, and summarized by AI; candidates can opt out before scheduled interviews.
• Personal information, including audio or video recordings, may be collected to evaluate the application.