WAF / Akamai Security Engineer

Job Title: WAF / Akamai Security Engineer

Location: NYC, NY or Alpharetta, GA or Montreal QC, Canada(Hybrid)

Job Type: Contract Position

WAF / Akamai Security Engineer

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