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.