Akamai WAF Security Engineer

Sensiple Inc is a New Jersey corporation with over two decades of expertise in technology-driven solutions specializing in Customer Experience, Contact Center Solutions, Digital Transformation, Cloud Computing & Independent Testing.

With an expert team that has enriched experience in executing & developing sustainable IT strategies in Healthcare, Technology, Retail, Logistics, Education, Telecommunications, Government and Media, we help our diverse customers to envision the future.

By developing highly scalable and consistent solutions, our primary goal is to deliver excellence at all levels and delight our customers and drive them to a better future.

Position: Akamai WAF Security Engineer

Work Location: Alpharetta, GA (Onsite) / New York City, NY (Onsite)

Duration: Long Term Contract

Job Description:

We are seeking an experienced WAF / Akamai Security Engineer to lead the onboarding, optimization, and management of our edge security infrastructure. In this role, you will play a pivotal part in protecting our internet-facing applications by migrating traffic to Akamai's Web Application Firewall (WAF), designing custom tuning policies, and defending critical assets against sophisticated attack vectors.

Responsibilities:

• Lead onboarding internet-facing applications to Akamai WAF.
• Work with applications, 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.
• 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, LLM, and 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 such as AI-powered detections, Firewall for AI, bot identification, and agentic AI protections.
• 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.
• 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.
• Assist with production incidents where application behavior changes after WAF enablement.
• Investigate latency issues, traffic-routing problems, load-balancer interactions, client IP handling, SurgeQueue Events, and application outages.
• Coordinate with Akamai engineering resources and internal teams to identify root causes and corrective actions.
• Advise application teams on secure web architectures, OWASP protections, API security, bot mitigation, client reputation controls, and DDoS protection.

Preferred Experience:

• AI/LLM security
• Akamai Firewall for AI
• Enterprise-scale migration experience
• Financial services experience