CDN & Cloud Network Engineer, Akamai

About the Role

This role focuses on Akamai CDN delivery, Akamai WAF, DNS and traffic management, and Azure networking connecting the edge back to origin. You will design and implement changes, serve as the point person for traffic anomalies, and elevate the standards for edge operations. You will collaborate with platform engineers, application pods, and cybersecurity, acting as the technical reference for CDN and edge security.

Key Responsibilities

• Own CDN delivery configurations across a large public web estate, including caching strategy, request routing, origin failover, and performance tuning, from design to implementation.
• Own WAF policy across the estate, covering rule design and tuning, false-positive triage, protection updates, and hands-on response during live attack traffic, in collaboration with cybersecurity.
• Manage DNS and global traffic management, including regional routing, load balancing, and failover between origins.
• Manage TLS certificates and secure delivery standards at the edge.
• Configure and troubleshoot Azure networking fronting origins: Application Gateway, load balancers, NSGs, DNS, and traffic routing.
• Lead technical investigations of complex performance and availability issues, tracing requests from browser through edge to origin using logs, monitoring, and diagnostic tooling.
• Act as senior technical escalation during incidents affecting traffic, availability, or edge security, and drive root cause analysis.
• Review changes and designs from other engineers, and share edge and CDN knowledge across the team.
• Maintain accurate and useful documentation, runbooks, and knowledge articles.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Akamai (Property Configuration, Caching, Routing, Origin Management)
• Akamai WAF (App & API Protector or Kona)
• HTTP/HTTPS, TLS, DNS, Caching behaviour, Headers
• Azure Networking (Application Gateways, Load Balancers, NSGs, DNS, Traffic Routing)
• Debugging tools (e.g., HAR files, curl output, edge logs)

Qualifications

• Deep, current hands-on experience running Akamai in production at scale.
• Hands-on experience operating Akamai WAF, including policy design and tuning, false-positive management, and real attack traffic response.
• Strong understanding of how the web works, including HTTP/HTTPS, TLS, DNS, caching behaviour, headers, and the full request path.
• Solid Azure networking experience.
• A track record of diagnosing hard production issues across edge, network, and application layers.
• Ability to produce clear technical documentation and explain edge behaviour effectively.

Desirable:

• Bot management and DDoS mitigation experience.
• Multi-CDN experience (e.g., CloudFront, Cloudflare, Tencent) or CDN migrations.
• Terraform (Akamai provider) and CI/CD pipeline experience.
• Experience operating within security and operational risk controls in regulated environments.
• Experience managing configuration through APIs or infrastructure as code.