Location: Remote – United States
Employment Type: Contract / Part-Time
Work Schedule: Approximately 20 hours per week, with potential for additional hours
Contract Duration: Initial term TBD, with potential for extension
Working Hours: U.S. business hours, preferably Central/Eastern Time
We are seeking a highly experienced Senior Network Security Engineer with Akamai CDN and Web Application Firewall (WAF) expertise to support a large enterprise environment.
The ideal candidate will have a strong foundation in enterprise networking, application delivery, web security, and hands-on troubleshooting of Akamai technologies.
This position is focused on Day-2 operational support, complex incident troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and collaborative remediation. The engineer will work closely with an established internal engineering team to diagnose and resolve production issues affecting application connectivity, security, and content delivery.
This is not a deployment, development, or automation engineering position. We are looking for an experienced technical troubleshooter who can quickly identify issues, analyze configurations, and recommend practical solutions in a complex enterprise environment.
Key Responsibilities
Provide senior-level engineering support for Akamai CDN, WAF, and application delivery environments.
Troubleshoot complex production incidents involving application availability, connectivity, performance, and security.
Investigate issues related to Akamai Property Manager, CDN configurations, origin connectivity, and content delivery.
Diagnose HTTP/HTTPS, TCP/IP, DNS resolution, SSL/TLS certificates, certificate chains, and handshake issues.
Analyze WAF security events, blocked requests, false positives, and application security policy behavior.
Troubleshoot existing Akamai Bot Manager configurations and bot-related access issues when applicable.
Investigate caching, routing, HTTP response codes, and origin server communication failures.
Assist with troubleshooting application issues identified after onboarding or deployment to Akamai.
Review configuration settings, diagnostic logs, and monitoring information to identify root causes.
Collaborate with network, security, application, and infrastructure teams during incident investigations.
Recommend corrective actions and assist with customer-approved remediation activities.
Participate in scheduled technical troubleshooting sessions and incident reviews.
Document technical findings, troubleshooting steps, and recommended resolutions.
Provide technical guidance and knowledge sharing to existing engineering personnel.
Follow established incident management, change management, and security procedures.
Required Qualifications
7+ years of professional experience in network engineering, network security, application delivery, or infrastructure operations.
Hands-on production support or troubleshooting experience with Akamai CDN and/or WAF technologies.
Strong knowledge of enterprise networking concepts, including TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/HTTPS, SSL/TLS, and application traffic flows.
Experience troubleshooting web application connectivity, origin server issues, certificate errors, and content delivery failures.
Understanding of CDN architecture, caching mechanisms, reverse proxies, and web application security controls.
Experience investigating production incidents, performing root cause analysis, and recommending corrective actions.
Ability to analyze application/network logs, HTTP response codes, and security events.
Experience collaborating with cross-functional technical teams in complex enterprise environments.
Strong communication, documentation, analytical, and problem-solving skills.
Ability to work effectively in a remote, collaborative engineering support model.
Preferred Qualifications
Advanced hands-on experience with Akamai Ion, Kona Site Defender, App & API Protector, or Property Manager.
Experience troubleshooting Akamai WAF policies, security rules, and false positives.
Familiarity with Akamai Bot Manager and bot mitigation troubleshooting.
Experience with Akamai Control Center, diagnostic utilities, and reporting tools.
Experience with enterprise application delivery platforms, reverse proxies, and load balancers.
Familiarity with packet analysis and network troubleshooting tools such as Wireshark, curl, and browser developer tools.
Experience with ITSM platforms such as ServiceNow.
Exposure to automated application onboarding or infrastructure-as-code environments.
Experience supporting large enterprise or highly regulated production environments.
Akamai technical certifications or equivalent practical experience.
Engagement Expectations
Approximately 20 hours per week, with a mutually agreed recurring schedule.
Remote engagement using customer-provided virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).
Collaborate with existing engineering staff on incident investigation and remediation.
Provide hands-on troubleshooting assistance and practical technical recommendations.
Follow customer security, access management, and production change control requirements.
Complete applicable background verification and security onboarding procedures.
Potential for contract extension or additional weekly hours depending on business requirements.
What This Role Does Not Require
Terraform development or deployment automation engineering.
New Akamai platform implementation or large-scale architecture redesign.
Dedicated DDoS/Prolexic, DNS platform, or Global Traffic Management administration.
Application software development.
Independent ownership of the entire Akamai environment.
24×7 monitoring or continuous on-call coverage.
Ideal Candidate Profile
A seasoned network security or application delivery engineer who has supported Akamai CDN/WAF technologies in real-world production environments.
The successful candidate should be comfortable investigating difficult application connectivity and security incidents, identifying root causes across multiple infrastructure layers, and working collaboratively with internal engineering teams to restore and maintain application functionality.
Strong production troubleshooting skills and practical Akamai experience are more important than certifications or automation development experience.
