Akamai (with AI Engineer)

Job Role : Akamai with AI Engineer

Location : NYC, NY or Alpharetta, GA – on site 3 days a week

Role Type: Contract

Client : Sincera (A part of Virtusa Company)

WAF / Akamai Security Engineer

1. WAF Onboarding & Application Migration

• Lead onboarding of internet-facing applications to Akamai WAF.

• Work with application, 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.

2. WAF Policy Tuning & 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 when justified.

3. AI, LLM & 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, including AI-powered detections, Firewall for AI, bot identification, and agentic AI protections.

4. Security Event Monitoring & 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.

5. Quarterly Security Reviews & 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.

6. Incident Response & Troubleshooting

• Assist with production incidents where application behavior changes after WAF enablement.

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

• Coordinate with Akamai engineering resources and internal teams to identify root causes and corrective actions.

7. Security Architecture & Design Consulting

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

• Provide guidance on best practices for onboarding, secure application design, and remediation of web vulnerabilities.

8. Program Management & Stakeholder Engagement

• Partner with application owners, infrastructure teams, auditors, risk managers, and security leadership.

• Track onboarding progress, risks, dependencies, and remediation activities through program governance and ticketing systems.

• Present status updates, metrics, risks, and remediation plans to senior management.

9. Operational Metrics & Reporting

• Produce dashboards and reporting covering:

o WAF adoption

o Deny-mode coverage

o Bot mitigation effectiveness

o API discovery

o Security exceptions

o Attack activity

• Measure onboarding progress, control effectiveness, and risk reduction across the organization.

10. Vendor Liaison & Technology Roadmap Guidance

• Act as the primary interface between the enterprise and Akamai.

• Engage Akamai product teams on product defects, enhancement requests, AI roadmap discussions, policy recommendations, and complex troubleshooting.

• Evaluate new Akamai capabilities and coordinate pilot deployments where appropriate.

Mandatory Experience

• 5+ years of Akamai experience

• Akamai Kona Site Defender

• Akamai Bot Manager

• Akamai API Security

• OWASP Top 10

• Incident response experience

Preferred Experience

• AI/LLM security

• Akamai Firewall for AI

• Enterprise-scale migration experience

• Financial services experience