Akamai WAF/CDN Security Architect
Benefits: Remote Competitive salary Opportunity for advancement Akamai WAF/CDN Security Architect Remote (On-call support and occasional off-hour maintenance activities required) 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.
This is a remote position.