Engineering Manager, Site Defense – Reddit - Reddit
Apply on Reddit →Reddit’s Transport and Site Defense teams build and operate foundational infrastructure behind one of the largest sites in the world. These teams own how requests enter Reddit, how services discover and talk to each other, how traffic moves across clusters and clouds, and how Reddit protects itself from DDoS attacks, scrapers, bots, and other undesired traffic.
We are looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to lead and grow the Site Defense teams. This is a high-impact role for a manager who can guide senior engineers, make strong technical and organizational tradeoffs, and help Reddit scale critical traffic and defense platforms while keeping the site available.
How You’ll Have Impact:
- Complete Reddit’s migration from Fastly to Cloudflare, including high-traffic properties such as reddit.com, media endpoints, Ads endpoints, e.reddit.com/gql-fed, devvit.reddit.com, and long-tail CDN traffic.
- Make Portal Transporter the predominant service discovery platform for Reddit, moving toward broad gRPC/xDS adoption and reducing fragmented service discovery.
- Migrate high-volume Thrift traffic to gRPC through TGRPC while preserving reliability, customer trust, and migration velocity.
- Reduce data transfer and cross-cluster networking costs through smarter routing, service discovery, and infrastructure standardization.
- Expand Site Defense coverage across post-CDN traffic, including TAC, RLS, TRS, Recaptcha, edge challenges, device attestation, IP reputation, and bot context.
- Deliver the Site Defense Platform and ML-at-ingress direction in a way that improves defense effectiveness while controlling false positives and preserving user experience.
- Operate merged Transport and Site Defense on-call responsibilities while protecting team focus, improving runbooks, cross-training engineers, and clarifying ownership boundaries with Site Experience SRE.
- Maintain high availability and low latency while performing large migrations on systems that sit directly in Reddit’s request path.
What you’ll do:
- Lead, hire, onboard, and develop a high-caliber team of infrastructure engineers across Transport and Site Defense.
- Partner with senior ICs to define technical strategy for global traffic, edge/CDN, service discovery, gRPC datapath, rate limiting, site defense, and bot detection infrastructure.
- Drive multi-quarter execution on high-risk platform migrations, including CDN migration, inter-cluster load balancer adoption, Thrift to GRPC migration, and Site Defense Platform expansion.
- Establish clear priority frameworks that balance KTLO, roadmap commitments, incidents, business-critical migrations, and cross-functional asks.
- Build and maintain a healthy operational model for critical infrastructure, including on-call quality, SLOs, dashboards, incident response, postmortems, and proactive maintenance.
- Collaborate deeply with partner teams across Consumer, Ads, Media Platform, Graph QL, SEO, Web Platform, Info Sec, Compute, ML Platform, Storage, DevEx, Safety/Trust, CIAM, and Site Experience SRE.
- Coach engineers through technical design, stakeholder alignment, project planning, execution risk, communication, and career growth.
- Create a culture of metrics-driven quality, operational transparency, crisp ownership, and pragmatic technical ambition.
Who You Might Be:
- 3+ years of people-management experience for software, infrastructure, platform, SRE, or security/abuse-defense engineering teams.
- 5+ years of experience building or operating internet-scale infrastructure, distributed systems, networking, cloud platforms, service mesh, edge/CDN, or reliability-critical systems.
- Strong technical judgment in areas such as Kubernetes, Envoy, Contour, xDS, gRPC, CDNs, DNS, load balancing, cloud networking, rate limiting, service discovery, traffic routing, and observability.
- Experience managing operationally critical services, including: on-call, incident response, reliability review, SLOs, and production-change safety.
- Proven ability to lead large migrations or platform adoption efforts across many customer teams.
- Ability to partner with senior/staff engineers and translate between technical detail, user impact, team capacity, and executive-level risk.
- Strong communication, prioritization, and stakeholder-management skills.
- High empathy for engineers and internal customers, with the judgment to protect team focus while still serving the business.
Nice To Have
- Experience with edge security, bot defense, DDoS mitigation, WAF, traffic reputation, Recaptcha/challenge systems, abuse detection, or fraud/risk infrastructure.
- Experience with Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, or similar CDN/edge providers.
- Experience with ML-enabled platform systems, online scoring, request annotation, signal pipelines, or false-positive-sensitive enforcement systems.
- Experience with cost optimization for large-scale cloud networking or service-to-service infrastructure.
- Hands-on software engineering experience in Go, Rust, Python, Java, C++, or similar production languages.
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
#LI-Remote
Pay Transparency:
This job posting may span more than one career level.
In addition to base salary, this job is eligible to receive equity in the form of restricted stock units, and depending on the position offered, it may also be eligible to receive a commission. Additionally, Reddit offers a wide range of benefits to U.S.-based employees, including medical, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) program with employer match, generous time off for vacation, and parental leave. To learn more, please visit https://www.redditinc.com/careers/.
To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share base salary ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. We set standard base pay ranges for all roles based on function, level, and country location, benchmarked against similar stage growth companies. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including, skills, depth of work experience and relevant licenses/credentials, and may vary from the amounts listed below.
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