Akamai with AI Engineer

Kutir Technologies; New York (NY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Kutir Technologies is seeking an Akamai with AI Engineer to join on-site in NYC, NY or Alpharetta, GA three days per week. You will lead onboarding of applications to Akamai WAF, tune policies, and address AI-related traffic protections.

The role requires strong incident response experience and hands-on work with Kona Site Defender, Bot Manager, and API Security. Responsibilities include monitoring security events, quarterly platform upgrades, and collaboration with application, DNS, and network

Qualifications

• 5+ years Akamai experience
• Akamai Kona Site Defender
• Akamai Bot Manager
• Akamai API Security
• OWASP Top 10
• Incident response experience

Responsibilities

• Lead onboarding of internet-facing applications to Akamai WAF with cross-functional teams and plan rollout, testing, and rollback.
• Tune WAF policies to minimize false positives while preserving protection.
• Troubleshoot AI/LLM traffic triggering WAF protections; design compensating controls and API protections.
• Review WAF and related events; analyze threats and propose policy improvements.
• Conduct quarterly reviews and upgrades of WAF settings and platform to align with threat intelligence.
• Assist in incident response; investigate latency, routing, and outages related to WAF enablement.
• Advise on secure web architectures and best practices for onboarding and remediation of web vulnerabilities.
• Coordinate with stakeholders and report progress, risks, and remediation plans to senior management.
• Produce dashboards on WAF adoption, bot mitigation, API discovery, and risk reduction metrics.
• Liaise with Akamai product teams; assess new capabilities and coordinate pilots.

Job description

Job Title: Akamai with AI Engineer
Location: NYC, NY or Alpharetta, GA on site 3 days a week
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:
  WAF adoption
  Deny-mode coverage
  Bot mitigation effectiveness
  API discovery
  Security exceptions
  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