WAF / Akamai Security Engineer
Job Description
Location: NYC, NY or Alpharetta, GA – onsite 3 days a week
1. WAF Onboarding & Application Migration
- Lead onboarding of internet-facing applications to Akamai WAF.
- Work with application, 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 & 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 & 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, including AI-powered detections, Firewall for AI, bot identification, and agentic AI protections.
4. Security Event Monitoring & 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 & 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 & 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 & 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 & 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 & Reporting
- Produce dashboards and reporting covering:
- WAF adoption
- Deny-mode coverage
- Bot mitigation effectiveness
- API discovery
- Security exceptions
- Attack activity
- Measure onboarding progress, control effectiveness, and risk reduction across the organization.
10. Vendor Liaison & 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
