Akamai Security Engineers

Job Description

WAF / Akamai Security Engineer

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Location : NYC, NY or Alpharetta, GA – onsite 3 days a week

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12+ Months

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Job Description

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1. WAF Onboarding & Application Migration

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• Lead onboarding of internet-facing applications to Akamai WAF .
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• Work with application, DNS, load balancer, proxy, firewall, and QA teams to migrate applications into monitor/alert mode and ultimately deny mode .
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• Coordinate testing, rollout plans, traffic cutovers, validation, and rollback procedures.
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2. WAF Policy Tuning & False Positive Analysis

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• Analyze production traffic and WAF events to identify false positives.
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• Tune security policies to reduce business impact while maintaining strong protection.
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• Review blocked requests, investigate application behavior, and create narrowly scoped exceptions when justified.
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3. AI, LLM & API Security Support

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• Troubleshoot AI- and LLM-related traffic that triggers WAF protections, such as SQL injection controls.
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• Work with application teams and vendors to design compensating controls, header-based attestation mechanisms, and API-specific protections.
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• Evaluate emerging Akamai AI security capabilities, including AI-powered detections, Firewall for AI, bot identification, and agentic AI protections.
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4. Security Event Monitoring & Threat Analysis

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• Review WAF, Bot Manager, DDoS, Client Reputation, and API Security events.
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• Analyze attack patterns and determine whether activity is malicious or legitimate.
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• Recommend policy improvements and mitigations based on observed threats.
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5. Quarterly Security Reviews & Platform Upgrades

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• Conduct structured reviews of applications protected by Akamai.
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• Evaluate opportunities to move applications from monitoring to mitigation mode.
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• Perform quarterly WAF upgrades, policy reviews, and security-control tuning to keep protections aligned with current threat intelligence.
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6. Incident Response & Troubleshooting

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• Assist with production incidents where application behavior changes after WAF enablement.
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• Investigate latency issues, traffic-routing problems, load-balancer interactions, client IP handling, surge queue events, and application outages.
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• Coordinate with Akamai engineering resources and internal teams to identify root causes and corrective actions.
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7. Security Architecture & Design Consulting

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• Advise application teams on secure web architectures, OWASP protections, API security, bot mitigation, client reputation controls, and DDoS protection .
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• Provide guidance on best practices for onboarding, secure application design, and remediation of web vulnerabilities.
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8. Program Management & Stakeholder Engagement

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• Partner with application owners, infrastructure teams, auditors, risk managers, and security leadership.
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• Track onboarding progress, risks, dependencies, and remediation activities through program governance and ticketing systems.
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• Present status updates, metrics, risks, and remediation plans to senior management.
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9. Operational Metrics & Reporting

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• Produce dashboards and reporting covering:
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• WAF adoption
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• Deny-mode coverage
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• Bot mitigation effectiveness
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• API discovery
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• Security exceptions
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• Attack activity
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• Measure onboarding progress, control effectiveness, and risk reduction across the organization.
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10. Vendor Liaison & Technology Roadmap Guidance

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• Act as the primary interface between the enterprise and Akamai .
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• Engage Akamai product teams on product defects, enhancement requests, AI roadmap discussions, policy recommendations, and complex troubleshooting.
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• Evaluate new Akamai capabilities and coordinate pilot deployments where appropriate.
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Mandatory Experience

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• 5+ years of Akamai experience
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• Akamai Kona Site Defender
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• Akamai Bot Manager
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• Akamai API Security
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• OWASP Top 10
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• Incident response experience
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Preferred Experience

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• AI/LLM security
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• Akamai Firewall for AI
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• Enterprise-scale migration experience
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• Financial services experience
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