Cyber Security Engineer (WAF SME)

this is 12 months
remote or hybrid in Atlanta

Interviews will be held over Teams
**MUST HAVE AKAMAI ON THEIR RESUME TO BE QUALIFIED FOR MANAGER REVIEW**
AKAMAI experience is an absolute must have as this will be the primary tool the contractor uses. Cloudflare is a secondary tool and will be a must have experience as well.
Absolutely must have 3-6 years of experience will not be considered an entry level position.
Prior Banking/Payments platform is not necessary.

Job Requisition - Contract
Posting Title: Cyber Security Engineer (WAF SME)
Position Type: Full-time (Contract)
Contract Length: 12 months (with potential to extend subject to business need)
Shift: 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM ET
On-Call: Participates in an on-call rotation for high-severity incidents
Type of Hire: Experienced (relevant combination of work and education)
Education Desired: Bachelor of Computer Engineering (or equivalent experience)
Travel Percentage: 1-5%
Work Location: Hybrid (Atlanta or Cincinnati) or Remote
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About the Role
We are seeking a Security Engineer (WAF SME) to join a dynamic security operations function. In this role, you will lead day-to-day operations, tuning, and incident response for our Web Application Firewall (WAF) and broader Web Application & API Protection (WAAP) stack-Akamai (primary) and Cloudflare (secondary).
You will maintain platform stability, drive false-positive reduction, improve protection efficacy against evolving threats, and ensure changes move safely through our standard change processes. You will collaborate closely with SOC/IR, App/Dev, SRE, and Network teams and participate in an on-call rotation for major incidents.
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What You Will Be Doing
Operational Support & Incident Handling
Monitor and action WAF/edge security ticket queues; resolve incidents and service requests with clear, timely communication.
Triage and respond to Layer 7 events (e.g., bot abuse, credential stuffing, API abuse, SQLi/RCE attempts, L7 DDoS), escalating as needed.
Provide on-call support for Sev 1/Sev 2 incidents; collaborate with SOC/IR, SRE, and application owners on containment and recovery.
Platform Administration & Tuning
Onboard, configure, tune, and optimize Akamai and Cloudflare WAF policies (managed & custom rules, rate limiting, geo/IP/ASN controls, mTLS, headers).
Manage bot management controls (scoring, allowlists, challenges/JS, behavioral features where available).
Implement policies for OWASP Top 10, API/WAAP protections, and business logic abuse mitigation.
Balance security vs. latency/caching; measure impacts and roll out changes safely.
Change, Hygiene & Governance
Execute changes via standard change control (peer review, testing, staged rollout, rollback plans).
Maintain certificate management, safe DNS/edge updates, and favor policy-as-code approaches where possible.
Provide platform health/status reporting with recommendations to reduce incident volume and downtime.
Monitoring, Telemetry & Reporting
Integrate WAF/edge telemetry with SIEM; maintain dashboards for threat trends, false positive rates, coverage, and hygiene.
Create actionable alerts and runbooks/SOPs to accelerate response and reduce recurrence.
Collaboration & Enablement
Partner with SOC/IR to enhance playbooks and Dev/App teams to align policies with application behavior.
Contribute to internal knowledge base and continuous improvement of control efficacy and resiliency.
Track emerging threats and vendor updates; recommend timely configuration changes and control enhancements.
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What You Need (Required Qualifications)
Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering (or related field) or equivalent practical experience.
3-6 years hands-on experience operating in Network Security space for any enterprise environment.
Must have at least 2 years of hands-on experience with Akamai.
Demonstrated expertise in policy tuning and incident response for web and API protections (blocking vs. challenge strategies, exception handling, FP reduction).
Solid grasp of HTTP/S, TLS/PKI, DNS, CDN caching/edge routing, and performance tradeoffs.
Experience integrating WAF logs into SIEM and building actionable dashboards/alerts.
Scripting/automation exposure (Terraform, bash, Python, Ansible or PowerShell), comfort with JSON/YAML and regex; API/CLI experience beneficial.
Strong analytical troubleshooting, communication, and cross-team collaboration skills.
Willingness to participate in rotational on-call.
Nice to Have (Preferred)
Certifications: Akamai ACA/ACP, Cloudflare, CISSP, Security , GIAC (GWAPT/GWEBIH), PCI ISA, AZ 104/AZ 700, AWS SAA/SOAA.
Familiarity with any of following: Cloudflare, Fastly, Imperva, F5 ASM/Advanced WAF, Azure Front Door, AWS CloudFront WAF.
Vendor/platform depth: F5 iRules, Fastly VCL behaviors, or vendor policy DSLs.
Broader security stack familiarity (e.g., DDoS scrubbing, SIEM/SOAR, CASB/CSPM, vuln management).
DevSecOps experience including CI/CD integration for edge policy promotion/testing.
Payments/financial services experience; working knowledge of PCI DSS, NIST CSF, ISO 27001.