PRACTICE DESCRIPTION

Business-critical applications depend on integrated application protection and application delivery services. Web Application Firewall, bot and DDoS protection, content delivery, load balancing, traffic management, DNS integration, certificate services, and cloud ingress platforms must operate as a coordinated service to maintain security, availability, performance, and user experience.

The WAF & Internet Ingress and Edge Manager leads the teams responsible for these capabilities. The role provides service ownership, operational governance, resource leadership, stakeholder coordination, escalation management, lifecycle planning, and continuous improvement across WAF and ingress platforms.

JOB SUMMARY

We are seeking an experienced WAF & Internet Ingress and Edge Manager to lead operational service delivery for enterprise application protection, load balancing, ingress, traffic management, and edge connectivity services.

The role is accountable for service performance, operational resilience, team effectiveness, customer engagement, risk management, application onboarding governance, incident escalation, platform lifecycle management, automation adoption, and cross-team execution. The manager works across application, cloud, networking, firewall, security, vendor, and operations teams to maintain secure, reliable, and supportable services.

Role positioning: This is a service ownership and people leadership role. The manager is not expected to perform every platform configuration personally, but must have sufficient technical depth to guide engineers, challenge designs, direct incident response, manage risk, and make informed operational decisions.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Service Leadership and Ownership

• Own end-to-end operational delivery for WAF and Internet Ingress & Edge services.
• Establish service priorities, operating rhythms, ownership boundaries, escalation paths, and performance expectations.
• Maintain alignment between WAF protection, application delivery, ingress, DNS, certificates, load balancing, and edge security operations.
• Represent the service tower in customer reviews, governance forums, architecture discussions, and operational planning activities.
• Ensure services remain secure, available, supportable, auditable, and aligned with business needs.

People and Resource Management

• Lead, coach, and develop WAF and Internet Ingress & Edge engineers across senior and staff levels.
• Manage staffing, work allocation, coverage schedules, on-call rotations, skills development, and succession planning.
• Promote cross-training between WAF, load balancing, cloud networking, DNS, certificates, and automation disciplines.
• Confirm team members follow standard work, change controls, documentation expectations, and operational procedures.
• Identify capacity or capability gaps and coordinate staffing, vendor, or specialist support as needed.

Operational Governance and Service Performance

• Own service metrics, SLA and KPI performance, operational reporting, risk tracking, backlog health, and improvement actions.
• Lead service reviews, problem management, root cause follow-through, and corrective action governance.
• Maintain clear intake, prioritization, approval, escalation, and lifecycle management processes.
• Ensure customer dependencies, approvals, and handoffs are visible and appropriately managed.
• Drive consistent documentation, runbooks, inventories, support records, and operating procedures.

Incident, Escalation, and Resilience Management

• Serve as an operational escalation point for significant availability, security, performance, or application delivery issues.
• Coordinate cross-team response across WAF, ingress, cloud, firewall, network, application, and vendor resources.
• Provide or support incident command when major incidents require structured coordination and stakeholder communication.
• Ensure recovery actions, communications, technical decisions, and follow-up items are documented and completed.
• Use incident and problem trends to improve resilience, monitoring, runbooks, and support readiness.

Platform Lifecycle and Continuous Improvement

• Own lifecycle planning across WAF, CDN, bot and DDoS capabilities, AWS ALB/NLB, AVI, Azure ingress, DNS, certificates, and associated automation.
• Guide platform upgrades, maintenance, capacity planning, modernization, decommissioning, and vendor coordination.
• Drive Infrastructure-as-Code, automation, configuration standardization, monitoring, and configuration drift remediation.
• Identify opportunities to simplify onboarding, reduce manual effort, improve observability, and increase operational consistency.
• Translate lessons learned into standard work and measurable service improvements.

Application Onboarding and Cross-Team Coordination

• Govern application onboarding, protection, service exposure, traffic management, and operational acceptance processes.
• Ensure ownership, dependencies, DNS, certificates, routing, monitoring, security, support, and rollback requirements are understood before production changes.
• Coordinate with application owners and dependent teams to minimize disruption and resolve blockers.
• Maintain clear accountability for business decisions, technical approvals, and operational responsibilities.
• Support predictable handoff from implementation into steady-state operations.

QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, Cybersecurity, or equivalent experience preferred.
• 8+ years of experience in WAF, application delivery, load balancing, cloud networking, edge security, infrastructure operations, or related technical disciplines.
• 3+ years of experience leading technical teams, service delivery, operations, or platform management.
• Experience managing business-critical production services using formal incident, change, problem, and lifecycle management practices.
• Working knowledge of WAF policy operations, CDN, bot and DDoS controls, AWS ALB/NLB, AVI, Azure ingress, DNS, SSL/TLS certificates, and Infrastructure as Code.
• Strong customer engagement, leadership, communication, risk management, troubleshooting, and decision-making skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading integrated WAF and application delivery teams in enterprise or regulated environments.
• Experience with Cloudflare, Akamai, F5 Distributed Cloud, Imperva, AWS WAF, Azure WAF/Front Door, or comparable platforms.
• Experience with Terraform, Git-based workflows, APIs, monitoring, SIEM integration, and operational automation.
• Experience managing on-call models and coordinating major incident response.
• Relevant certifications such as CISSP, CCSP, AWS Solutions Architect, AWS Advanced Networking, Azure Network Engineer Associate, ITIL, or comparable credentials.

TECHNICAL AND LEADERSHIP SKILLS

Service Leadership

• Team and capacity management
• Stakeholder and vendor leadership
• Cross-tower coordination
• Coaching and succession planning
• Decision-making under pressure

WAF & Edge Platforms

• WAF, CDN, bot and DDoS services
• AWS ALB/NLB, AVI, Azure ingress
• DNS, certificates, routing and traffic
• Terraform and configuration automation
• Monitoring and configuration drift

Operations & Government

• SLA/KPI and service review ownership
• Incident command and escalation
• Change, problem, and risk management
• Lifecycle and roadmap governance
• Standard work and continuous improvement