Senior Akamai CDN Engineer

Job Title: Senior Akamai CDN Engineer

Job Location: San Jose, CA

Job Type: Contract

Pay Range: $74.77hr - $78.92hr

Job Overview:

The Senior CDN Engineer will design, configure, secure, automate, monitor, and support enterprise content delivery services using Akamai. The role supports high-traffic public websites, APIs, and software downloads, with a strong focus on Akamai Property Manager, edge caching, Bot Manager, App & API Protector, NetStorage, web performance, and production reliability. The candidate will work across web, application, network, security, and vendor teams to deliver secure and reliable global services.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and maintain Akamai CDN architecture for public websites, APIs, portals, and software downloads.
• Configure Akamai Property Manager, edge hostnames, origins, caching rules, routing rules, redirects, compression, Tiered Distribution, and activation workflows.
• Configure and tune Akamai Bot Manager and Fraud Management controls to detect, allow, rate-limit, challenge, or block automated traffic.
• Support Akamai App & API Protector, Web Application Firewall rules, rate controls, DDoS mitigation, Site Shield or Site Defender, and security exceptions.
• Manage Akamai NetStorage and automate the publishing or synchronization of large software and product downloads.
• Improve website and download performance by tuning cache headers, cache keys, time-to-live values, edge caching, API acceleration, and origin offload.
• Use Akamai Control Center, Traffic Reports, Security Center, Edge Diagnostics, mPulse, Web Security Analytics, and log delivery data to monitor and troubleshoot services.
• Troubleshoot regional latency, cache misses, origin health, DNS, TLS certificates, HTTP errors, website availability, API delivery, and download failures.
• Create monitoring, alerting, dashboards, and thresholds for traffic spikes, bot activity, DDoS events, origin health, and service-level compliance.
• Automate CDN and content-delivery tasks using Akamai APIs, Python, GitHub, Jenkins CI/CD, Terraform, Bash, PowerShell, or similar tools.
• Support identity and access integrations for Akamai administration, including enterprise SSO technologies such as SAML and Okta.
• Lead production changes, release support, incident response, root-cause analysis, vendor escalations, documentation, and knowledge transfer.

Required Skills:

• Advanced hands-on experience with Akamai CDN, Property Manager, Control Center, edge caching, routing rules, and origin configuration.
• Hands-on experience with Akamai Bot Manager or Fraud Management, bot classification, mitigation policies, tuning, reporting, and false-positive management.
• Experience with Akamai App & API Protector, WAF, DDoS mitigation, Site Shield or Site Defender, rate limiting, and web security analytics.
• Experience with Akamai NetStorage, large-file or software-download delivery, and automated content synchronization.
• Strong knowledge of HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, TLS, TCP/IP, headers, cookies, cache control, status codes, and browser-to-edge-to-origin traffic flow.
• Experience with cache optimization, Tiered Distribution, API acceleration, origin offload, regional performance analysis, and web performance metrics.
• Experience using Akamai Traffic Reports, Security Center, Edge Diagnostics, mPulse, log delivery, or comparable monitoring and analytics tools.
• Automation and DevOps experience using REST APIs, Python, Git, Jenkins or another CI/CD platform, and infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Experience supporting high-traffic production websites, customer portals, APIs, or globally distributed applications.
• Ability to lead complex incident troubleshooting and communicate clearly with application, network, security, and business teams.

Qualifications:

• 7+ years of relevant experience in CDN, web infrastructure, application delivery, web security, software engineering, or site reliability engineering.
• Several years of hands-on experience supporting Akamai in a production enterprise environment.
• Strong troubleshooting, automation, documentation, communication, and cross-team collaboration skills.

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• Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance
• 401(k) Retirement Plan
• Health Savings Account (HSA)
• Disability Insurance (Short-Term and Long-Term)
• Life and AD&D Insurance
• Paid Sick Leave (where required by applicable state or local law)
• Supplemental Insurance Plans
• Identity Theft Protection
• Pet Insurance
• Employee Wellness Programs
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Career Growth and Professional Development Opportunities