Principal Security Engineer - Akamai Inference Cloud

Akamai develops distributed cloud, edge, security, content delivery, and AI platforms, and its Akamai Inference Cloud team enables customers to run AI inference models. The Principal Security Engineer will own the platform's end-to-end security posture, leading architecture, threat modeling, AI-specific security initiatives, compliance readiness, and incident response across infrastructure, runtimes, APIs, model pipelines, and customer-facing services.

Responsibilities:

• Defining and owning the security architecture spanning Kubernetes infrastructure, inference runtimes, control plane APIs, and model lifecycle pipelines
• Establishing threat models, security standards, and hardening guidelines across all platform teams and ensuring consistent adoption through reviews and automated enforcement
• Leading security design reviews for critical systems including model serving environments, multi-tenant isolation, authentication and authorization frameworks, and data handling pipelines
• Driving AI-specific security initiatives including defense against prompt injection, model extraction, adversarial inputs, data poisoning, and model supply chain attacks
• Owning compliance readiness for regulatory frameworks (ISO27001, SOC 2, GDPR), and emerging AI governance standards, partnering with legal and compliance teams
• Developing and maturing the platform's security incident response capabilities including detection, investigation, and remediation playbooks for both traditional and AI-specific threats
• Collaborating with Akamai's broader security organization to align inference platform security practices with enterprise standards and share learnings across product lines

Requirements:

• Have 8 years of relevant experience and a Bachelor's degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Security Engineering, or a related field
• Demonstrate deep expertise across application security, infrastructure security, and cloud-native security with experience as a security technical lead or architect
• Show hands-on experience with AI/ML security challenges including model serving attack surfaces, prompt injection mitigation, and adversarial robustness
• Have proven ability to define security architecture and threat models for complex distributed systems spanning multiple engineering teams
• Demonstrate experience with compliance frameworks and the ability to translate regulatory requirements into engineering controls
• Show proficiency in Python, Go, or similar languages with experience building security tooling, automation, or detection systems