WAF / Akamai Security Engineer

AllianceIT Inc; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

AllianceIT Inc. is seeking an on-site Security Engineer/Program Manager to lead WAF onboarding for internet-facing applications, tune policies, and address AI/LLM traffic protections.

The role collaborates across application, DNS, load balancer, and security teams to ensure testing, rollout plans, and secure de-risking strategies. Responsibilities include analyzing WAF events, mitigating false positives, and coordinating quarterly reviews and platform upgrades to align with threat intelligence.

Qualifications

• Experience with web application firewalls (WAF) onboarding, tuning, and monitoring.
• Ability to analyze false positives and adjust policies with minimal business impact.
• Familiarity with AI/LLM traffic protections and API security controls.

Responsibilities

• Lead onboarding of applications to Akamai WAF and migrate to monitor/deny modes.
• Tune security policies to balance protection with business impact.
• Troubleshoot AI/LLM traffic and design compensating controls for protections.
• Review WAF events and threats to determine malicious vs legitimate activity; propose mitigations.
• Conduct quarterly security reviews, policy upgrades, and threat elevation activities.
• Advise on secure web architectures, OWASP protections, and DDoS controls.
• Coordinate program governance with stakeholders and track remediation actions.
• Produce security metrics dashboards covering API discovery, exceptions, and risk reduction.

Skills

Akamai WAF

WAF Onboarding

WAF Policy Tuning

AI security

API security

OWASP protections

DDoS protection

Threat analysis

Program management

Tools

Akamai

Job description

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

Job Description

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.
• 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:
• API discovery
• Security exceptions
• Measure onboarding progress, control effectiveness, and risk reduction across the organization.
• 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.