Principal Security Engineer

Akamai•Cambridge, MA

1d•$132,100 - $237,900•Hybrid

About The Position

Do you want to own the security posture of a globally distributed AI inference platform from the ground up? Are you driven to solve security challenges that span traditional infrastructure and the emerging AI threat landscape? Join the Akamai Inference Cloud Team! The Akamai Inference Cloud team is part of Akamai's Cloud Technology Group. We design, implement, and operate AI platforms enabling customers to run inference models with unmatched performance, compliance, and economics. As our Principal Security Engineer, you will be the primary security authority across the entire platform spanning infrastructure, runtimes, APIs, model lifecycle, and customer-facing services. Partner with the best. As a Principal Security Engineer, you'll define and drive security strategy end to end. You will lead security architecture decisions across multiple engineering teams, establish threat models and standards, and serve as the accountable owner for the platform's security posture. This role bridges traditional infrastructure security with AI-specific concerns including model safety, runtime isolation, and adversarial resilience.

Requirements

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

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 (FedRAMP, 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