Akamai WAF Security Engineer

Job Summary

We are seeking an experienced Akamai WAF Security Engineer with 5+ years of hands-on experience implementing, managing, and optimizing Akamai Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions. The ideal candidate will lead enterprise application onboarding and migration to Akamai WAF, perform WAF policy tuning, support AI/LLM and API security initiatives, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to enhance web application security across the organization.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead onboarding and migration of internet-facing applications to Akamai Kona Site Defender (WAF).
• Coordinate with application, DNS, load balancer, firewall, proxy, and QA teams to execute application migrations, testing, cutovers, and rollback plans.
• Analyze WAF events, investigate false positives, and tune security policies while minimizing business impact.
• Review production traffic, blocked requests, and implement targeted policy exceptions where appropriate.
• Support AI/LLM workloads and API security, including troubleshooting AI-generated traffic, designing compensating controls, and implementing API-specific protections.
• Monitor and analyze security events across WAF, Bot Manager, API Security, Client Reputation, and DDoS platforms.
• Conduct quarterly security reviews, WAF upgrades, policy optimization, and migration from monitor mode to deny mode.
• Investigate production incidents, application latency, traffic routing, load balancer interactions, and WAF-related outages.
• Provide security architecture guidance on OWASP Top 10, API security, bot mitigation, DDoS protection, and secure web application design.
• Partner with application owners, infrastructure teams, auditors, risk management, and security leadership to track onboarding progress and remediation activities.
• Develop dashboards and metrics for WAF adoption, security exceptions, bot mitigation effectiveness, API discovery, and attack trends.
• Serve as the primary technical liaison with Akamai, supporting product enhancements, troubleshooting, roadmap discussions, and pilot deployments.

Required Skills

• 5+ years of hands-on experience with Akamai Web Application Security.
• Strong experience with Akamai Kona Site Defender (KSD).
• Experience with Akamai Bot Manager.
• Experience with Akamai API Security.
• Strong understanding of OWASP Top 10 web application security risks.
• Experience in WAF policy tuning, false-positive analysis, and security event monitoring.
• Experience responding to production security incidents and troubleshooting WAF-related issues.
• Knowledge of DNS, Load Balancers, Reverse Proxies, Firewalls, SSL/TLS, and HTTP/HTTPS protocols.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with AI/LLM Security.
• Hands-on experience with Akamai Firewall for AI.
• Enterprise-scale WAF migration and application onboarding experience.
• Experience in the Financial Services domain.
• Knowledge of API security, bot mitigation, DDoS protection, and Client Reputation controls.