Job Description

Do you thrive on technical leadership and building cutting-edge AI systems?

Are you ready to shape the platform foundations that power AI inference at global scale?

Join the Akamai Inference Cloud Team!

The Akamai Inference Cloud team is part of Akamai's Cloud Technology Group. We build AI platforms for efficient, compliant, and high-performing applications. These platforms support customers in running inference models and empower developers to create advanced AI solutions effectively. #AIC

Partner with the best

The Senior II Software Engineer Lead designs and develops foundational features for a global AI inference platform. Responsibilities include CDN, APIs, Kubernetes orchestration, observability, and deployment models. Expertise in distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, and API infrastructure is required to ensure secure, scalable, and reliable solutions. The role also emphasizes collaboration and mentoring within the team environment.

As a Senior II Software Engineer Lead, you will be responsible for:

• Leading the design and implementation of critical platform components for Akamai Inference Cloud, ensuring performance, scalability, and reliability.
• Driving technical decisions for your domain, selecting appropriate tools, frameworks, and architectural approaches for secure, scalable, and high-performance inference platform services.
• Leading the evolution of platform capabilities including authentication, load balancing, rate limiting, firewall integration, and externally facing API patterns.
• Designing and improving data plane APIs, including OpenAI-compatible interfaces and other standards required to support diverse inference and AI application workloads.
• Defining and advancing platform observability through metrics, logging, tracing, monitoring, and operational diagnostics for distributed systems at scale.
• Driving capacity planning and scalability strategies to ensure the platform can support growth in traffic, models, and regional deployments.
• Leading Kubernetes-based orchestration patterns for platform services, helping ensure efficient, resilient, and operable deployment of containerized workloads.
• Mentoring and guiding engineers on the team through code reviews, design discussions, and technical problem-solving.
  
  

Do What You Love

To be successful in this role you will:

• Possess 8+ of software engineering expertise with advanced proficiency in distributed systems, cloud services, and platform engineering.
• Demonstrate deep experience building and operating internet-facing platform services such as API gateways, ingress layers, reverse proxies, or service infrastructure.
• Demonstrate advanced expertise in cloud-native architectures, incorporating containerization and orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes.
• Have proven experience building scalable, high-performance systems with modern DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Exhibit technical leadership by guiding, promoting code quality, and delivering solutions for intricate platform challenges.
• Have experience designing and operating API platforms, including authentication, authorization, traffic management, and service protection patterns.
• Demonstrate extensive expertise in observability, monitoring, alerting, and debugging processes for large-scale distributed systems.
• Have experience with capacity planning, performance analysis, and reliability engineering for production services.
  
  

Work in a way that works for you

FlexBase, Akamai's Global Flexible Working Program, is based on the principles that are helping us create the best workplace in the world. When our colleagues said that flexible working was important to them, we listened. We also know flexible working is important to many of the incredible people considering joining Akamai. FlexBase, gives 95% of employees the choice to work from their home, their office, or both (in the country advertised). This permanent workplace flexibility program is consistent and fair globally, to help us find incredible talent, virtually anywhere. We are happy to discuss working options for this role and encourage you to speak with your recruiter in more detail when you apply.

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At Akamai, we're curious, innovative, collaborative and tenacious. We celebrate diversity of thought and we hold an unwavering belief that we can make a meaningful difference. Our teams use their global perspectives to put customers at the forefront of everything they do, so if you are people-centric, you'll thrive here.

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