Akamai Security Engineer / Akamai WAF Engineer@Alpharetta,GA

Role: Akamai Security Engineer / Akamai WAF Engineer

Location: Alpharetta, GA, USA

Onsite

Experience: 7-10 years

Primary Skills: WAFs, API Security, AWS Application Migration

Skill Cluster: AIMS Security NetSec

Ideal Candidate: An Akamai security engineer with strong hands-on experience in WAF onboarding and policy tuning, internet-facing application migrations, API security, threat analysis, and production incident troubleshooting.

Job Description

We are seeking an experienced Akamai Engineer to manage Web Application Firewall (WAF) onboarding, application migrations, security policy tuning, API security, and threat monitoring. The role involves collaborating with application and infrastructure teams to ensure secure application delivery while minimizing business impact.

Key Responsibilities

1. WAF Onboarding and Application Migration

• Lead onboarding of internet-facing applications to Akamai WAF.
• Coordinate with application, DNS, load balancer, proxy, firewall, and QA teams.
• Migrate applications from monitor/alert mode to deny mode.
• Manage 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.
• Investigate blocked requests and application behavior.
• Create narrowly scoped exceptions to address legitimate traffic issues.

3. AI/LLM and API Security Support

• Troubleshoot AI- and LLM-related traffic triggering WAF protections, including SQL injection controls.
• Work with application teams and vendors to implement compensating controls.
• Design header-based attestation mechanisms and API-specific protections.
• Evaluate Akamai AI security capabilities, including AI-powered detections, Firewall for AI, bot identification, and agentic AI protections.

4. Security Event Monitoring and Threat Analysis

• Monitor WAF, Bot Manager, DDoS, Client Reputation, and API Security events.
• Analyze attack patterns and distinguish malicious activity from legitimate traffic.
• Recommend security policy improvements and threat mitigation measures.

5. Quarterly Security Reviews and Platform Upgrades

• Conduct structured security reviews of applications protected by Akamai.
• Identify opportunities to move applications from monitoring to mitigation mode.
• Perform quarterly WAF upgrades, policy reviews, and security-control tuning.
• Align security protections with current threat intelligence.

6. Incident Response and Troubleshooting

• Investigate production incidents following WAF enablement.
• Troubleshoot latency, traffic routing, load balancer interactions, client IP handling, surge queue events, and application outages.
• Coordinate with Akamai engineering and internal teams to identify root causes and implement corrective actions.

7. Security Architecture and Design Consulting

• Advise application teams on secure web architecture and OWASP protections.
• Provide guidance on API security, bot mitigation, client reputation controls, and DDoS protection.
• Support incident response activities.

Required Skills

• #Akamai
• #WAF
• #WAFOnboarding
• #ApplicationMigration
• #WAFPolicyTuning
• #APISecurity
• #AWSApplicationMigration
• #OWASP
• #BotManager
• #DDoSProtection
• #SecurityEventMonitoring
• #IncidentResponse
• #FalsePositiveAnalysis

Preferred Experience

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