Security Engineer - Edge & Cloud Security (Akamai / AWS)

Are you ready to play a pivotal role in safeguarding critical applications during a monumental enterprise cloud migration? Aquent is partnering with a leading financial services innovator to find a talented security professional who will defend the application layer, make critical decisions protecting millions of users, and directly influence the security roadmap for a seamless transition to a cloud-native architecture. This is your chance to leverage your advanced application security skills on a global scale, driving the foundational security of a highly sophisticated hybrid and cloud infrastructure.

About the Opportunity

Our client is dedicated to securing critical customer data and delivering seamless, protected experiences. By joining this forward-thinking team through Aquent, you will collaborate with top-tier talent in an environment that deeply values innovation, resilience, and cutting-edge security practices. In this role, you will be instrumental in architecting and maintaining a resilient security posture across hybrid and cloud environments, collaborating strategically with cross-functional teams to secure routing cutovers, mitigate sophisticated threats, and ensure policy parity between on-premise and cloud workloads.

Your Impact and Key Responsibilities

• Design, optimize, and meticulously maintain critical Akamai WAF rulesets, rate-limiting policies, and custom bot detection conditions aligned with diverse application risk profiles.
• Collaborate strategically with cloud migration teams to design secure routing cutovers and guarantee policy parity between on-premise and cloud workloads throughout complex transitional states.
• Act as the Tier-3 escalation authority during active Layer 7 attacks, automated scraping, credential stuffing, and zero-day exploit attempts, performing rapid triage and conducting thorough post-incident root cause analyses.
• Establish robust baseline evaluation methodologies for all new rule updates, orchestrating staging deployments, and proactively suppressing false positives to maintain optimal security efficacy.
• Integrate Akamai log streams with central logging solutions such as Splunk and Datadog to construct dynamic threat dashboards and provide clear, actionable executive reporting.
• Create and maintain precise architectural diagrams, detailed runbooks, and comprehensive policy documentation to empower operational handoffs and foster collaborative knowledge sharing across engineering teams.

What You Bring: Must-Have Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, or equivalent practical experience demonstrating a strong foundation in technical principles.
• Five or more years of direct, hands-on experience deploying, managing, and expertly tuning Akamai Web Application Firewall (Kona / App & API Protector) and Bot Manager Premier (BMP) within high-traffic, multi-tenant enterprise architectures.
• A proven track record in incident response, including tuning behavioral bot detections, effectively mitigating Layer 7 DDoS and credential stuffing attacks, and eliminating false positives without compromising legitimate user experience.
• Deep understanding of OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, critical API security risks, HTTP/S protocol behaviors, and advanced threat mitigation strategies specifically at the edge.
• Working knowledge of AWS networking and application architectures, including ALBs, CloudFront, Route 53, and VPCs, and how edge proxies seamlessly integrate into complex hybrid cloud routing.
• Strong proficiency in network analysis tools such as Wireshark, cURL, Fiddler, and Postman, alongside browser inspection techniques for efficient payload debugging.
• Extensive experience with enterprise log analysis and SIEM tooling, such as Splunk, Elastic, or Sentinel.
• Exceptional verbal and written technical communication skills, with the confidence and ability to advise both software engineers and senior leadership effectively during critical incidents.

What Will Set You Apart: Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience managing edge security configurations through Infrastructure as Code using Terraform or Akamai CLI / APIs.
• Previous security engineering experience specifically within financial services, e-commerce, or other highly regulated enterprise environments.
• Active and relevant security or cloud certifications, such as Akamai Certified Specialist, AWS Certified Security - Specialty, CCSP, or GIAC (GWAPT, GCIH).