WAF Engineering Lead

The WAF Engineering Lead role is intended to maximise the operational performance of WTW services and maintain a strong secure posture. The role is accountable for BAU support of issues, controlling policy & compliance and supporting change activities. This role ensures the technical success of WAF services within the WTW environment in a Tier 3 capacity and management of direct reports.

The Role

• Perform analysis and tuning of WAF policies to minimise false positives and false negatives while maintaining an appropriate security posture.
• Design, implement, maintain and optimise WAF policies across multi-cloud environments.
• Lead the investigation and mitigation of web application attacks, including OWASP Top 10 threats, bot attacks, credential stuffing, scraping, Layer 7 DDoS attacks and other web-based threats.
• Develop, maintain and enhance custom WAF rules, managed rule exclusions, rate-limiting policies and bot protection controls.
• Support transition of WAF policies from Detection mode to Prevention/Block mode through structured analysis, tuning, testing and stakeholder engagement.
• Analyse attack patterns, logs and telemetry to identify emerging threats and implement effective mitigations.
• Work closely with application owners, development teams and security stakeholders to ensure secure onboarding and operation of internet-facing applications.
• Provide subject matter expertise for web application security, secure application delivery and WAF best practices.
• Provide technical leadership to Audit & Compliance, Capacity Management, Lifecycle Management, Vulnerability Management and Risk Management Functions.
• Provide leadership during major incidents and drive to quick resolutions.
• Provide line management for direct reports
• Point of escalation for areas of accountability
• Coach team members on a proactive basis, raising the team’s overall technical acumen.
• Restore service and complete root cause analysis of all incidents, driving actions to mitigate the root cause and remove risk of reoccurrence.
• Participate on the Technical Design Authority forum
• Implement changes/POCs to the environment in a controlled manner, with implementation and test plans.

Qualifications

The Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology strongly preferred, or relevant industry experience in related field.
• Minimum 5 years’ leadership experience (direct reports) in similar role
• Minimum 5 years’ experience in IT or Telecoms industry. Financial Services experience preferred.
• Minimum 5 years’ Azure WAF/Network management experience
• Minimum 5 years’ Network Security experience. Azure Firewall, Palo Alto Firewall/VPN, Cisco would be advantageous.
• Demonstrable experience investigating, analysing and resolving WAF false positives and false negatives.
• Strong experience implementing WAF solutions in Detection mode and transitioning policies to Prevention/Block mode through appropriate tuning and validation.
• Proven experience developing and maintaining custom WAF rules, rule exclusions, rate limiting controls and attack mitigation policies, rather than solely relying on out-of-the-box managed rules.
• Extensive knowledge of web application attack vectors, including OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Remote Code Execution (RCE), bot attacks, credential stuffing and API abuse.
• Hands-on experience with attack mitigation, threat analysis and creation of bespoke security controls based on observed attack patterns.
• Strong understanding of bot protection technologies, managed rule sets, policy tuning and wider web application security best practices.
• Experience with Azure Front Door WAF and Azure Application Gateway WAF in enterprise-scale environments.
• Experience working across multi-cloud environments and/or vendor-agnostic WAF platforms.
• Experience deploying and managing WAF infrastructure using Terraform or other Infrastructure as Code (IaC) technologies.
• Experience supporting large-scale production environments with responsibility for change implementation, incident response and threat mitigation.
• Ability to blend creativity, problem solving, and technical skills for refining existing concepts or developing new approaches.
• Ability to enable changes in the business processes and ability to work cooperatively with stakeholders and peers is essential.
• Ability to work under pressure and to resolve issues effectively.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills.