Senior Software Engineer, Site Defense

14d•Remote

About The Position

Reddit is a community of communities. It’s built on shared interests, passion, and trust, and is home to the most open and authentic conversations on the internet. Every day, Reddit users submit, vote, and comment on the topics they care most about. With 100,000+ active communities and approximately 116 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information. For more information, visit www.redditinc.com. We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the Site Defense team within Reddit’s Infrastructure organization. Site Defense is responsible for protecting Reddit at internet scale—serving as the first line of defense against DDoS attacks, automated abuse, large-scale scraping, and other network-level threats. This is a high impact role that sits at the intersection of distributed systems, networking, security, and applied machine learning. You will help design and operate critical infrastructure that safeguards Reddit’s availability, performance, and trust.

Requirements

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 Haves

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.

Responsibilities

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

Benefits

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

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