Akamai WAF and Application Security Engineer, AI Security

Kaizen Technologies; Alpharetta (GA); Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Kaizen Technologies seeks an Akamai Engineer with expertise in WAF, AI security, and application migration to Alpharetta, GA or NYC. The role focuses on onboarding internet-facing applications to Akamai WAF, tuning policies, and coordinating migrations with multiple teams.

Ideal candidates have 10+ years in security engineering, strong knowledge of API security, and experience with AI-driven security capabilities. This hybrid role requires weekly office presence in Alpharetta or NYC.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of security engineering and WAF deployments.
• Experience onboarding applications to Akamai WAF and migrations.
• Knowledge of API security and AI/LLM security features.

Responsibilities

• Lead onboarding internet-facing apps to Akamai WAF and migrate to deny mode.
• Coordinate testing, rollout plans, traffic cutovers, validation and rollback procedures.
• Tune WAF policies to reduce business impact while maintaining protection.
• Analyze production traffic and WAF events to identify false positives and adjust rules.
• Troubleshoot AI/LLM traffic triggering protections and design compensating controls.
• Coordinate with Akamai engineers and internal teams for root-cause analysis.
• Advise on secure web architectures, OWASP protections, and DDoS protection.

Skills

WAFs

API Security

AWS Application Migration

Tools

Akamai WAF

Job description

Title: Akamai Engineer with WAF, AI Security, fire wall

Location: Alpharetta, GA or NYC - weekly 3 days working from office

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.

Preferred Experience

• AI/LLM security Akamai Firewall for AI Enterprise-scale migration experience Financial services experience Work Experience 7-10Years