Staff Security Engineer - Bot & Traffic Defence

About the Role

Our Engineering organization owns the software that makes our marketplace work. Our Bot & Traffic Defence function owns how Faire holds up against automated traffic: scraping, credential abuse, and application-layer DDoS, from the edge through to detection and scoring.

As a Staff Security Engineer, Bot & Traffic Defence, you will be the first dedicated owner of this domain. You will set the technical direction, build the controls and signals that back it, and establish an ownership model that holds across Security, Platform, service teams, and Anti-Abuse.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical strategy and roadmap for bot, scraping, and application-layer DDoS defence end to end, from edge controls through detection and scoring.
• Author and tune edge security controls as code: WAF rules, rate limiting policies, and challenge mechanisms.
• Build higher-confidence bot and trust signals so that Faire can enforce more aggressively without turning legitimate logged-out buyers away.
• Design and operate distributed layer 7 rate limiting, deciding keying, counter state, and enforcement location.
• Make incident response for bot and DDoS events a solved problem with clear paging paths, actionable runbooks, and observability.
• Lead post-incident reviews on recurring classes of bot incidents to address systemic causes.
• Build tooling, secure defaults, and playbooks allowing service-owning teams to protect their own endpoints.
• Land a durable ownership model across Security, Platform, service teams, and Anti-Abuse.
• Make Faire's bot posture legible to leadership, providing a defensible view of residual risk.

Qualifications

• Hands-on operational ownership of a CDN or edge security platform (Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, or AWS CloudFront/WAF/Shield) in production, managed as code.
• Experience defending a high-traffic consumer site against scraping and application-layer DDoS.
• Practical understanding of bot detection signals (TLS/HTTP fingerprinting, behavioral signals, mobile device attestation) and precision/recall trade-offs.
• Experience designing distributed rate limiting at layer 7 across a fleet.
• Quantitative rigour in detection work to measure precision/recall and defend threshold changes with data.
• Preference for solving traffic and abuse problems with code and building internal tooling.
• Comfort writing and reviewing code in an OOP language such as Kotlin, Java, Python, or TypeScript.
• Working fluency with infrastructure as code and cloud environments (Terraform, AWS or GCP, Kubernetes).
• Experience owning incident response for live traffic attacks, including the authority to block traffic under time pressure.
• Proven track record setting technical direction in ambiguous domains and driving cross-team ownership models.