Akamai Engineer with AI exp

Job Title: Akamai with AI Engineer

Location: NYC, Alpharetta, GA

Role: Contract C2C 

Job Description:

Please share a few local folks or willing to relocate to NYC or Alpharetta, GA. 

3 days a week onsite is mandatory. 

Please find the JD below:

1. WAF Onboarding and Application Migration

Lead onboarding internet-facing applications to Akamai WAF.

 Work with applications, DNS, load balancer, proxy, firewall, and QA teams to migrate applications into

monitor/alert mode and ultimately deny mode.

 Coordinate testing, rollout plans, traffic cutovers, validation, and rollback procedures.

2. WAF Policy Tuning and False Positive Analysis

 Analyze production traffic and WAF events to identify false positives.

 Tune security policies to reduce business impact while maintaining strong protection.

 Review blocked requests, investigate application behavior, and create narrowly scoped exceptions when

justified.

3. AI, LLM, and API Security Support

 Troubleshoot AI- and LLM-related traffic that triggers WAF protections such as SQL injection controls.

 Work with application teams and vendors to design compensating controls, header-based attestation

mechanisms, and API-specific protections.

 Evaluate emerging Akamai AI security capabilities such as AI-powered detections, Firewall for AI, bot

identification, and agentic AI protections.

4. Security Event Monitoring and Threat Analysis

 Review WAF, Bot Manager, DDoS, Client Reputation, and API Security events.

 Analyze attack patterns and determine whether activity is malicious or legitimate.

 Recommend policy improvements and mitigations based on observed threats.

5. Quarterly Security Reviews and Platform Upgrades

 Conduct structured reviews of applications protected by Akamai.

 Evaluate opportunities to move applications from monitoring to mitigation mode.

 Perform quarterly WAF upgrades, policy reviews, and security-control tuning to keep protections aligned

with current threat intelligence.

6. Incident Response and Troubleshooting

 Assist with production incidents where application behavior changes after WAF enablement.

 Investigate latency issues, traffic-routing problems, load-balancer interactions, client IP handling, surge

queue events, and application outages.

 Coordinate with Akamai engineering resources and internal teams to identify root causes and corrective

actions

7. Security Architecture and Design Consulting

 Advise application teams on secure web architectures, OWASP protections, API security, bot mitigation,

client reputation controls, and DDoS protection.

 Provide guidance on best practices for onboarding, secure application design, and remediation of web

vulnerabilities

8. Program Management and Stakeholder Engagement

 Partner with application owners, infrastructure teams, auditors, risk managers, and security leadership.

 Track onboarding progress, risks, dependencies, and remediation activities through program governance

and ticketing systems.

 Present status updates, metrics, risks, and remediation plans to senior management

9. Operational Metrics and Reporting

 Produce dashboards and reporting covering WAF adoption, deny-mode coverage, bot mitigation

effectiveness, API discovery, security exceptions, and attack activity.

 Measure onboarding progress, control effectiveness, and risk reduction across the organization.

10. Vendor Liaison and Technology Roadmap Guidance

 Act as the primary interface between the enterprise and Akamai.

 Engage Akamai product teams on product defects, enhancement requests, AI roadmap discussions, policy

recommendations, and complex troubleshooting.

 Evaluate new Akamai capabilities and coordinate pilot deployments where appropriate.

Mandatory Experience

·                      5+ years of Akamai experience

·                      Akamai Kona Site Defender

·                      Akamai Bot Manager

·                      Akamai API Security

·                      OWASP Top 10

·                      Incident response experience

·                     Preferred Experience

·                      AI/LLM security

·                      Akamai Firewall for AI

·                      Enterprise-scale migration experience

·                      Financial services experience