Cyber Engineer III - API Security

The Senior Engineer, Application & API Security is a key member of the E-WAAP team and serves as a technical lead for our Akamai-based web and API security platform. You will:

• Lead onboarding of new applications and APIs onto Akamai (WAF, CDN, bot, and API security capabilities).
• Design and tune security policies to protect against OWASP Top 10, API abuse, bots, and DDoS while preserving performance and user experience.
• Partner with product teams, developers, and cloud teams to embed E-WAAP into CI/CD and DevSecOps workflows.

This role reports into the G5 Manager, Application & API Security (E-WAAP) and will provide coaching and technical direction to G3 Engineers and G2/G3 Analysts as we in-source capabilities from our managed services provider.

Responsibilities & Accountabilities:

• Platform engineering & design
  • Lead the onboarding of new web and API workloads to Akamai, from discovery and architecture review to staging, validation, and production cutover.
  • Design and implement WAF, bot management, DDoS, and rate-limiting policies tailored to application risk profiles and business requirements.
  • Build reusable configuration patterns, templates, and reference architectures for common McDonald’s application types (e.g., marketing sites, e-commerce, APIs, partner integrations).
  • Use Akamai APIs, automation frameworks, and infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform, Python, CI/CD pipelines) to manage configurations at scale.

• Security operations & tuning
  • Lead incident triage and investigations for WAF, API, and bot-related events; coordinate containment, tuning, and long-term fixes.
  • Analyze WAF and CDN logs to identify attacks, false positives, and evasion attempts; refine policies, exception sets, and custom rules.
  • Collaborate with Security Operations, Threat Intelligence, and product security teams to map emerging threats into new or updated rulesets.
  • Drive continuous improvement in detection quality, block rates, and false-positive reduction while maintaining performance SLAs.

• Dev & automation focus
  • Partner with developers to integrate Akamai security checks into CI/CD (e.g., automated policy promotions, pre-prod validation jobs, automated regression checks).
  • Develop internal tools and scripts (Python, Bash, TypeScript, etc.) to streamline common workflows (policy cloning, bulk updates, configuration linting).
  • Provide technical requirements and guidance into product roadmaps for observability, logging, and security analytics.

• Governance, metrics, and leadership
  • Own platform health and risk metrics (coverage, rule adoption, false positives, incident volume, MTTR) and present them regularly to leadership and stakeholders.
  • Lead operational governance forums with product teams to review posture, tuning backlog, and upcoming changes.
  • Mentor and coach G3 Engineers and Analysts; provide guidance on investigations, change reviews, and documentation.
  • Contribute to and lead updates of SOPs, intake processes, runbooks, and standards for Akamai and E-WAAP.

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, Information Technology, or equivalent experience.
• Knowledge of Agile software development process including application of Agile techniques and delivery practices and promoting adoption of Agile methodologies to secure outcome-driven mindset in product teams.
• Experience working with large-scale, global, high-availability platforms (CDN, edge, or cloud) where performance and latency are critical.
• Prior experience with Akamai APIs, Terraform, or other infrastructure-as-code tools for managing Akamai configurations at scale.
• Familiarity with SIEM/SOAR tools and log analysis for WAF and CDN events.
• Industry certifications in security or cloud (e.g., CISSP, CCSP, GIAC, cloud provider security certifications).

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