Akamai Security Engineer

Salary: $78,000 - 118,000 per year Requirements:

• 5+ years of Akamai experience
• Experience with Akamai Kona Site Defender, Akamai Bot Manager, and Akamai API Security
• Knowledge of the OWASP Top 10
• Incident response experience
• Preferred: AI/LLM security experience, including Akamai Firewall for AI
• Preferred: Enterprise-scale migration experience
• Preferred: Financial services experience

• Lead onboarding of internet-facing applications to Akamai WAF, coordinating migrations from monitor/alert mode to deny mode with application, DNS, load balancer, proxy, firewall, and QA teams.
• Coordinate testing, rollout plans, traffic cutovers, validation, and rollback procedures.
• Analyze production traffic and WAF events for false positives, tune policies, investigate blocked requests, and create narrowly scoped exceptions when justified.
• Troubleshoot AI- and LLM-related traffic that triggers WAF protections, and collaborate with application teams and vendors on compensating controls, header-based attestation, and API-specific protections.
• Evaluate Akamai AI security capabilities, including AI-powered detections, Firewall for AI, bot identification, and agentic AI protections.
• Monitor WAF, Bot Manager, DDoS, Client Reputation, and API Security events; assess attack patterns and recommend policy improvements and mitigations.
• Conduct structured security reviews of Akamai-protected applications, assess migration to mitigation mode, and perform quarterly WAF upgrades and policy tuning.
• Support production incidents related to WAF enablement, investigating latency, traffic routing, load balancer interactions, client IP handling, surge queue events, and application outages.
• Coordinate with Akamai engineering and internal teams to identify incident root causes and corrective actions.
• Advise application teams on secure web architecture, OWASP protections, API security, bot mitigation, client reputation controls, DDoS protection, onboarding practices, and vulnerability remediation.
• Partner with application owners, infrastructure teams, auditors, risk managers, and security leadership; track onboarding progress, risks, dependencies, and remediation through governance and ticketing systems.
• Present status updates, metrics, risks, and remediation plans to senior management.
• Produce dashboards and reports on WAF adoption, deny-mode coverage, bot mitigation effectiveness, API discovery, security exceptions, and attack activity; measure onboarding progress, control effectiveness, and risk reduction.
• Serve as the primary liaison with Akamai, engaging its product teams on defects, enhancements, AI roadmap discussions, policy recommendations, and complex troubleshooting.
• Evaluate new Akamai capabilities and coordinate pilot deployments where appropriate.

• Agentic AI
• AI
• API
• Firewall
• Support
• LLM
• OWASP
• Security
• WAF
• Web
• SQL

More:

We are hiring a WAF / Akamai Security Engineer for an onsite role in New York City, NY, or Alpharetta, GA, with an onsite schedule of three days per week. The engagement is expected to last 12+ months.

last updated 42 week of 2026