Senior Security Researcher

Job Description

Are you excited to work with innovative security products?

Are you a security researcher who thrives at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity - turning data into detection at scale?

Join Guardicore (now Akamai Enterprise Security Group)

Akamai Hunt, part of Akamai's Enterprise Security Group, specializes in detection, threat intelligence, and research to identify hidden threats worldwide. Leveraging AI-driven security, the team deploys agentic workflows and AI agents to investigate threats and scale detection engineering across billions of daily events. Join us to push the frontier of AI-powered security operations.

Join Hunt Research Team!

The Senior Security Researcher role involves developing detection methods and techniques to identify emerging threats for Akamai customers. Close collaboration with researchers, data engineers, and product teams is essential. Together, you will translate threat intelligence into production-grade detections and shape the future of AI-powered security operations.

In This Role You Will Be

• Designing, building, and validating new detections across large-scale customer telemetry, transforming threat research into impactful results.
• Building and deploying AI agents for independent investigation workflows and detection engineering pipelines, incorporating context management, tool orchestration, and multi-step reasoning.
• Evaluating and iterating on detection quality - measuring false positive rates, building benchmarks, and establishing feedback loops that continuously improve accuracy.
• Analyzing diverse telemetry including network connections, Active Directory, cloud activity, endpoint data (Windows/Linux), segmentation policies, and vulnerability exposure to identify threats and anomalies.
• Leading key research initiatives and proof-of-concepts, shaping Hunt's detection and analytics platform's strategic direction.
• Translating cutting-edge research into clear, actionable recommendations and effectively communicating findings to customers and stakeholders.
  
  

Do What You Love

To be successful in this role you will:

• 5+ years of experience in cybersecurity research, detection engineering, threat hunting, or incident response (including military experience).
• Demonstrate day-to-day use of AI coding agents and LLM-based development workflows as a core part of your engineering and research practice.
• Design, test, and tune detections using attacker behavior insights and system telemetry through practical detection engineering experience.
• Have solid understanding of networking protocols and technologies (TCP/IP, DNS, SMB, HTTP/S, etc.).
• Be familiar with attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
• Demonstrate Python and SQL expertise with experience handling extensive security data in cloud data warehouses like BigQuery.
  
  

About Us

At Akamai, we make life better for billions of people, trillions of times a day.

Whether you're streaming live events, scrolling social media, watching your favorite series, or managing your savings, we're the engine behind the scenes. We provide the world's most distributed platform from Cloud to Edge to help the giants of the digital world work faster and stay more secure, making the internet a better experience for everyone.

Our Focus Is Simple

Cloud and Edge: Running apps closer to users for instant performance.

Security: Neutralizing threats before they ever reach your data.

Content Delivery: Scaling the world's biggest moments without a glitch.

AI: Enabling our customers to build, secure, and scale AI apps on the world's most distributed cloud platform.

At Akamai, we don't just support the internet; we power and protect it, because behind every great digital experience is a massive hidden challenge. And we're the ones who solve it. When millions of people hit play or pay, Akamai ensures it just works.

Benefits at Akamai: We support your health, well-being, finances, and life beyond work. See our benefits.

FlexBase adapts to your job's needs

Akamai's FlexBase program is yet another way we show our commitment to providing employees with an exceptional workplace experience. It's not about telling employees where to work; it's about supporting employees to do their best work.

We trust our incredible employees to work in ways that suit them best: at home, in an office, or a combination of both.

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