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

Aquent is partnering with a leading financial services organization at the forefront of digital innovation to find a talented security professional who will play a pivotal role in safeguarding critical applications during a monumental enterprise cloud migration. In this dynamic role, you will be the central figure defending the application layer, making critical decisions that directly protect millions of users and ensure the integrity of vital global financial operations. Your expertise will not only secure a rapidly evolving digital landscape but will also directly influence the security roadmap, enabling a seamless and resilient transition to a cloud-native architecture.

About the Opportunity

Our client is dedicated to securing critical customer data and delivering seamless, protected experiences. By joining this forward-thinking team, you will collaborate with top-tier talent in an environment that deeply values innovation, resilience, and cutting-edge security practices. This is an incredible opportunity to leverage your advanced application security skills on a global scale, driving the foundational security of a highly sophisticated hybrid and cloud infrastructure.

Your Impact and Key Responsibilities

In this role, you will be instrumental in architecting and maintaining a resilient security posture across hybrid and cloud environments. You will collaborate strategically with cross-functional teams to secure routing cutovers, mitigate sophisticated threats, and ensure policy parity between on-premise and cloud workloads.

• 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).