Akamai WAF/CDN Security Architect

Benefits

• Remote
• Competitive salary
• Opportunity for advancement

Role Overview

• Location: Remote (On-call support and occasional off-hour maintenance activities required)
• Type: Full-Time / Contract

We are seeking a highly experienced and hands-on Akamai WAF/CDN Security Architect to support enterprise-scale application onboarding, edge security implementation, and CDN operations.

This role requires a strong technical leader who can independently drive discussions with Akamai vendors, application teams, and security stakeholders from day one. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in Akamai WAF/CDN technologies, application delivery, internet-facing architectures, and production troubleshooting.

Responsibilities

• Lead onboarding and migration of applications onto Akamai CDN and WAF platforms.
• Configure, maintain, and support Akamai edge security and content delivery services.
• Implement and tune WAF policies, security controls, caching rules, and traffic management configurations.
• Work closely with application, network, cloud, and security teams to ensure secure and optimized application delivery.
• Troubleshoot complex Layer 1-7 issues involving DNS, TLS/SSL, HTTP/HTTPS, CDN behavior, caching, and origin connectivity.
• Support production incidents, root cause analysis, and operational escalations.
• Participate in on-call rotation and support maintenance activities during off-hour change windows.
• Develop technical documentation, runbooks, operational procedures, and audit artifacts.
• Collaborate with vendors and internal stakeholders on application onboarding and security initiatives.
• Support security assessments, audits, remediation activities, and compliance requirements.
• Provide technical guidance and mentoring to engineering teams.

Required Skills

• 10 years of overall IT infrastructure/network/security experience.
• 5 years of hands-on experience with Akamai CDN and WAF technologies in enterprise environments.
• Strong expertise with:
  • Akamai Kona Site Defender (KSD)
  • Akamai CDN
  • Edge DNS
  • Property Manager
  • Bot Manager
  • TLS/Certificate Management
• Strong understanding of:
  • HTTP/HTTPS
  • TLS/SSL
  • DNS
  • TCP/IP
  • CDN caching
  • Load balancing
  • Web application security
• Experience with OWASP Top 10 mitigation and WAF tuning.
• Experience supporting cloud-native applications in AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Familiarity with enterprise ADC/load balancer technologies such as F5, AVI, Citrix ADC, A10, or Cloudflare.
• Strong troubleshooting, analytical, and communication skills.
• Experience working directly with vendors and driving technical discussions independently.

Preferred Qualifications

• Akamai certifications preferred.
• Experience with automation/scripting using Python, Shell, Terraform, or APIs.
• Experience with SIEM integrations, DevSecOps, and Infrastructure-as-Code.
• Prior experience supporting large-scale internet-facing enterprise applications.