Job Description

Job Title: Akamai WAF Security Engineer

Location: New York, NY or Alpharetta, GA (Hybrid, onsite 3 days a week)

Work Authorization: Any valid US work authorization (no visa restrictions)

Employment Type: Contract

Duration: Long Term

Rate: $70/hr c2c

About the Role
We are looking for an experienced Akamai WAF Security Engineer to lead the onboarding, tuning, and ongoing protection of internet-facing applications on the Akamai platform. You will work closely with application, infrastructure, and security teams. You will also be the main technical contact with Akamai, and you will help shape the company's approach to securing AI and LLM-driven traffic.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead onboarding of internet-facing applications to Akamai WAF. Move applications from monitor/alert mode to deny mode through planned testing, cutovers, validation, and rollback procedures.
• Coordinate with application, DNS, load balancer, proxy, firewall, and QA teams during migrations.
• Analyze production traffic and WAF events to find false positives. Tune security policies and create narrowly scoped exceptions where justified.
• Troubleshoot AI and LLM traffic that triggers WAF protections, such as SQL injection rules. Design compensating controls, header-based attestation, and API-specific protections.
• Evaluate new Akamai AI security capabilities, including AI-powered detections, Firewall for AI, bot identification, and agentic AI protections.
• Review WAF, Bot Manager, DDoS, Client Reputation, and API Security events. Decide whether activity is malicious or legitimate and recommend mitigations.
• Run quarterly security reviews, WAF upgrades, and policy tuning to keep protections aligned with current threats.
• Support production incidents involving latency, traffic routing, load balancer interactions, client IP handling, surge queue events, and outages after WAF enablement.
• Advise application teams on secure web architecture, OWASP protections, API security, bot mitigation, and DDoS protection.
• Track onboarding progress, risks, and remediation through governance and ticketing processes. Present status, metrics, and risks to senior management.
• Build dashboards and reports on WAF adoption, deny-mode coverage, bot mitigation, API discovery, security exceptions, and attack activity.
• Act as the primary liaison with Akamai on defects, enhancement requests, roadmap discussions, complex troubleshooting, and pilot deployments.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on Akamai experience
• Strong experience with Akamai Kona Site Defender
• Experience with Akamai Bot Manager
• Experience with Akamai API Security
• Solid understanding of the OWASP Top 10
• Proven incident response and production troubleshooting experience

Preferred Qualifications

• AI/LLM security experience
• Experience with Akamai Firewall for AI
• Enterprise-scale WAF or application migration experience
• Financial services industry experience

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