JR Cyber Security Engineer; WAF SME

Overview

An client of Insight Global is hiring a Cyber Security Engineer (WAF SME) for a 12 month contract role, who will:

• Own day‑to‑day Akamai (primary) and Cloudflare (secondary) WAF operations
• Monitor and respond to WAF / edge security tickets and incidents
• Tune managed and custom WAF rules to reduce false positives
• Manage bot controls, rate limiting, geo/IP/ASN policies, headers, and mTLS
• Support Sev 1 / Sev 2 incidents in collaboration with SOC, IR, SRE, and App teams
• Push changes through standard change control with testing and rollback plans
• Build dashboards, alerts, and runbooks to improve response time and resilience
• Track emerging threats and recommend proactive control enhancements

This role supports ongoing and expanding Web Application & API Protection (WAAP) operations, with a strong focus on Akamai WAF ownership. The team needs a hands‑on SME to stabilize, tune, and continuously improve edge security controls while partnering closely with SOC, IR, App, and SRE teams.

We are a company committed to creating diverse and inclusive environments where people can bring their full, authentic selves to work every day. We are an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer that believes everyone matters. Qualified candidates will receive consideration for employment regardless of their race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, marital status, national origin, ancestry, genetic factors, age, disability, protected veteran status, military or uniformed service member status, or any other status or characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations, and ordinances.

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• 3–6+ years in Network / Web Security in an enterprise environment
• 2+ years hands‑on Akamai WAF experience (non‑negotiable)
• Strong experience with:
• • WAF / WAAP policy tuning
• • Layer 7 attacks (bot abuse, credential stuffing, API abuse, SQLi, RCE, L7 DDoS)
• • Blocking vs. challenge strategies and exception handling
• Solid understanding of:
• • HTTP/S, TLS/PKI, DNS
• • CDN caching, edge routing, and performance tradeoffs
• Experience integrating WAF logs into SIEM and building dashboards/alerts
• Willing to participate in on‑call rotation
• Cloudflare, Fastly, Imperva, F5 ASM/Advanced WAF experience
• Scripting or automation exposure (Terraform, Python, Bash, Power Shell, Ansible)
• Akamai ACA / ACP certifications
• Cloud certs (AWS, Azure)
• Dev Sec Ops  / CI‑CD integration for edge policies
• Payments or financial services background
• Familiarity with PCI DSS, NIST CSF, ISO 27001
• Comfortable with JSON/YAML, regex, APIs/CLIs