Akamai Engineer

Job Title : Akamai Engineer

Location: Alpharetta, GA or NYC (Hybrid Role)

Duration: Contract

Primary Skill : WAFs, API Security, AWS Application Migration

Experience : 10 years

Job Description :

WAF Onboarding and Application Migration

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.

WAF Policy Tuning and 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 , LLM, and API Security Support Troubleshoot AI- and LLM-related traffic that triggers WAF protections such as SQL injection contrls 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.

Security Event Monitoring and 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.

Quarterly Security Reviews and 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.

Incident Response and Troubleshooting Assist with production incidents where application behavior changes after WAF enablement.

Investigate latency issues, traffic-routing problems, load-balancer interactions, client IP handling, surgqueue events, and application outages.

Coordinate with Akamai engineering resources and internal teams to identify root causes and correctiveactions

Security Architecture and Design Consulting Advise application teams on secure web architectures, OWASP protections, API security, bot mitigation client reputation controls, and DDoS protection.

Incident response experience