Filterlist Engineer

Filterlist Engineer, Privacy

Remote - USA, Canada, South America, Europe

About Brave

Brave is on a mission to protect the human right to privacy online. We’ve built a free web browser that blocks creepy third-party ads and trackers by default, the only native adblocker that is not limited by Manifest V3, a private search engine with a truly independent index, and a private ad network (opt-in!) that directly rewards you for your attention. And we’re just getting started. Already 100 million people have switched to Brave for a faster, more private web. Millions more switch every month.

The Web is a sea of privacy-harmful ads, hackers, and echo chambers. Big Tech makes huge profits off our data, and tells us what’s true and what’s not. Brave is fighting back. Join us!

Summary

We are hiring a member of the Brave privacy team to work on filterlist-based ad & tracker blocking. 

Important: this is not a classic software engineering role. Maintenance, debugging and fast fixes via adblock rules are a big component of this job. You will be spending most of your time making sure websites work on Brave browser, shipping blocking rules that make users’ lives easier and safer (example: cookie consent notice blocking), and coming up with clever ways of countering adversarial websites that discriminate against Brave’s mission of a user-first Web for all. 

Brave benefits greatly from open-source adblocking work, and a huge part of our ethos is contributing the work that we do back to the adblocking community. We work closely with filter list authors across the board. Most of the work in this position is expected to be open-source; your work will have a Web-wide impact on a daily basis. See our USENIX talk on how we scaled adblocking to millions of users. 

Your responsibilities in this role will include:

• Creating and maintaining Brave’s adblock rules and shipping fast fixes for breaking websites (we do multiple automated deployments an hour!)
• Reverse-engineering and debugging parts of the Web (HTML, CSS and especially JavaScript) that interact badly with Brave’s third-party adblocking.
• Contributing to open-source adblocking projects like EasyList or uBlock Origin and making sure Brave users are getting the best ad & tracker blocking experience possible.
• Monitoring and addressing feedback from the community by creating fixes to resolve user-submitted reports.
• Helping the privacy team to come up with novel ways of solving webcompat issues categorically. For example: Cookiecrumbler.

Required qualifications

• Proficiency in JavaScript. At least 3 years of experience is preferred.
• Familiarity with the adblocking and filter list ecosystem (or willingness to learn).
• You know your way around DevTools for reverse-engineering websites, debugging code, and figuring out how web apps tick.
• Very comfortable working and communicating async with a geographically-distributed team.
• Proficiency working with Git and comfortable collaborating on GitHub.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with adblocking rules and filter lists.
• Experience reverse-engineering complex JavaScript on (adversarial) websites.
• Experience participating in open source communities (almost all of our work at Brave is done in the open on GitHub).
• Ability to handle conflict in face of competing priorities.
• Familiarity with Web technologies and the Web security model.
• Be excited about privacy, anonymity, and a user-first Web!

Working at Brave

• Industry-leader in privacy, with an award-winning privacy engineering team that’s innovating everyday to keep people safer online and beat Big Tech
• Highly competitive salaries & benefits, and generous home-office stipends
• Fully remote team (no office, no commute) with a low-meeting culture
• Welcoming, humble, ridiculously smart teammates, and a truly flat org structure
• Opportunity to get in early at a hyper-growth company, and revolutionize the Web
• Oh, and did we mention Brendan Eich, our CEO & co-founder, invented JavaScript?

Check us out at www.brave.com!