Twitter is hiring engineers to beef up its Anti-Spam division

In a job posting on its site today Twitter has announced its need for a full-time software engineer to work on its anti-spam systems. The posting is asking for applicants with experience in building large scale server applications and who can help Twitter to use ‘intelligent reputation systems and rate limiting’ to prevent abuse.

Twitter is looking for great engineers to build large scale systems for quickly identifying abusive content.  You should be excited about thwarting the ever-evolving tactics of attackers and helping to make Twitter a great experience for our users.  You’ll be working on a small team of talented engineers doing big things in the world of abuse detection and response.

Twitter already has a division working on anti-spam technologies, byt this is evidence that it takes the problem seriously and is looking to attack the problem with vigor. Many Twitter users site spam as the worst issue plaguing the service today as it can become an insanely irritating and distracting experience dealing with spam messages.

Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo has said that the company is interested in being more agressive about the methods it uses to combat spam saying “we’re working on it. We are trying to migrate from “reactive” to “realtime” to “predictive” on that front.”

The posting wraps up with this message:

We cook up anti-spam science, write tools for trust agents, implement policies on the product, and write services for abuse investigation and response.  We fend off attacks by performing real-time searches over data sets in the billions, and we take decisive action with extreme prudence.  Also, we sometimes go the zoo.

Here’s hoping those zoo trips give the team some inspiration because I’m tired of getting sent adverts for free iPads.