Software Engineer (Java, C++)
The Staff Software Engineer on Confidential Client's Site Defense team is responsible for designing, developing, and operating high-scale, low-latency distributed systems to protect the platform from DDoS attacks, bots, and automated abuse. This role involves collaborating with cross-functional teams to enhance security infrastructure, mentoring junior engineers, and contributing to machine learning initiatives for traffic and bot detection, ensuring Confidential Client's resilience and security at internet scale.
About Careertakes
👉 Important disclosure: Careertakes is a third-party recruiting platform supporting this hiring process. If selected, you will be employed directly by our client, Technology, Information and Internet.
Applicants for this role may also receive access to additional matched opportunities through the Careertakes platform.
Role overview
Confidential Client is hiring an experienced Software Engineer with strong systems, networking, and security experience to help design, build, and operate defenses at internet scale. This role focuses on ingress-level protection (DDoS mitigation, bot detection, WAFs, edge/CDN integration) and real-time systems that score and mitigate malicious traffic while preserving performance and user experience.
What You’ll Do
Confidential Client’s Site Defense and Transport teams operate high-throughput, low-latency systems that protect platform availability and integrity. As a core contributor you will:
- Design, implement, and operate scalable, low-latency services to detect and mitigate DDoS, scraping, bot, and automated-abuse traffic.
- Build and improve ingress defenses spanning CDN/edge, proxies, and internal load-balancing layers.
- Develop real-time scoring pipelines and per-request inference to block or rate-limit malicious actors with minimal false positives.
- Integrate with WAFs, bot-management systems, and anti-abuse tooling; tune rules and features for production traffic.
- Collaborate with Infrastructure, Security, and Product teams to balance protection, latency, and user experience.
- Own services end-to-end: architecture, implementation, monitoring, SLOs, and on-call rotations.
- Participate in incident response and lead post-incident reviews to harden defenses.
- Mentor junior engineers and elevate team software-engineering practices.
Qualifications
Minimum qualifications we need to see:
- 7+ years building and operating high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems.
- Proficiency in one or more compiled or systems languages (Java, C++, Go, Rust) and comfort with Python for tooling or pipelines.
- Strong networking fundamentals: HTTP, TLS, TCP/IP, proxies, CDNs, and load balancing.
- Direct experience or strong familiarity with DDoS mitigation strategies, WAFs, bot management, or anti-abuse systems.
- Proven experience with production incident response and post-incident analysis.
- Strong communication skills and demonstrated ability to collaborate across teams.
Preferred / Nice-to-have
- Experience with real-time machine learning inference, streaming feature pipelines, or model-based traffic classification.
- Familiarity with anti-abuse frameworks and bot scoring (e.g., ReCaptcha, Datadome, Turnstile).
- Background applying ML models to latency-sensitive systems or building feature stores for online serving.
- Prior work on CDN/edge integrations, proxy architectures, or large-scale traffic engineering.
Benefits & Perks
Confidential Client provides a competitive benefits package designed to support health, well-being, and financial security:
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
- Income replacement programs and mental-health resources.
- Retirement plan with employer contributions.
- Global programs for family planning, caregiving, and professional development.
- Paid time off, parental leave, and other paid programs.
Location & Work Authorization
- Location: United States (role may involve distributed teams and cross-time-zone collaboration).
- Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States. Confidential Client will follow applicable federal and state hiring laws.
Keywords & Technologies
Primary focus areas and keywords: distributed systems, DDoS mitigation, bot detection, network security, WAF, CDN/edge, Java, C++, Go, Python, real-time inference.
Equal Opportunity & Hiring Transparency
Careertakes and our client are Equal Opportunity Employers committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce. We prohibit discrimination or harassment of any kind. To support a fair and efficient hiring process, AI tools may be used to assist with application review or resume screening. These tools do not replace human decision-making. Final hiring decisions are made by people.
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