Job Description WAF L1 & L2 Engineer:

Role: WAF L1 & L2

Experience: 1 to 7 years (Network Security / Web Application Security)

Location: Mumbai

Certification: Akamai WAF Certified Professional (mandatory/preferred)

Role Overview:

We are seeking a skilled WAF L1 & 2 Engineer to manage and support Web Application Firewalls (WAF), with a strong focus on Akamai Kona Site Defender and related Akamai security solutions. The candidate will provide operational support, incident response, and policy tuning while working closely with application and security teams to protect enterprise applications from evolving web threats.

Key Responsibilities:

- Provide L1 & L2 support for Akamai WAF (Kona Site Defender), including policy tuning, configuration, and troubleshooting.

- Monitor and analyze WAF events, logs, and alerts to detect and mitigate web attacks.

- Handle incident management and escalation to L3 or vendor support when required.

- Onboard new applications and services into the Akamai WAF platform, including ruleset design and deployment.

- Collaborate with application, DevOps, and security teams to validate and optimize protection policies.

- Perform root cause analysis of recurring WAF-related incidents and propose long-term fixes.

- Support change management activities (policy updates, upgrades, patching).

- Maintain and update documentation, SOPs, and runbooks for WAF operations.

- Stay updated with OWASP Top 10, CVEs, and latest web security threats.

- Work with compliance/audit teams to ensure WAF security standards are met.

Required Skills & Qualifications:

- 17 years of experience in Network Security / Application Security.

- Hands-on experience with Akamai WAF (Kona Site Defender).

- Strong knowledge of OWASP Top 10, web threats, and mitigation techniques.

- Proficiency in HTTP/HTTPS, TLS, DNS, TCP/IP protocols.

- Experience in policy configuration, false positive tuning, and custom rule creation.

- Familiarity with Akamai Control Center (Luna Portal) and API integrations.

- Good understanding of CDN, reverse proxy, caching, and load balancing concepts.

- Strong incident troubleshooting and analytical skills.

- ITIL process knowledge (Incident/Change/Problem Management).

Preferred Skills:

- Certification: Akamai WAF Certified Professional (mandatory/preferred).

- Experience with other WAFs (Cloudflare, AWS WAF, F5 ASM, Imperva, FortiWeb).

- Scripting/automation knowledge (Python, Shell, REST APIs).

- Exposure to SIEM tools (Splunk, QRadar, ELK) for WAF log analysis.

- Understanding of Bot Manager, API Security, or DDoS protection.

Education:

- Bachelors degree in Computer Science, IT, or related field.

- Relevant security certifications (Akamai, CEH, GIAC, etc.) are an added advantage.