Akamai with AI Engineer

Job Role : Akamai with AI Engineer

Location : NYC, NY or Alpharetta, GA – on site 3 days a week

Role Type: Contract

Client   : Sincera (A part of Virtusa Company)

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:

o             WAF adoption

o             Deny-mode coverage

o             Bot mitigation effectiveness

o             API discovery

o             Security exceptions

o             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