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 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.
Learn what makes Akamai a great place to work
We power and protect life online, by solving the toughest challenges, together.
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.
Working for you
At Akamai, we will provide you with opportunities to grow, flourish, and achieve great things. Our benefit options are designed to meet your individual needs for today and in the future. We provide benefits surrounding all aspects of your life:
- Your health
- Your finances
- Your family
- Your time at work
- Your time pursuing other endeavors
Our benefit plan options are designed to meet your individual needs and budget, both today and in the future.
About us
Akamai powers and protects life online. Leading companies worldwide choose Akamai to build, deliver, and secure their digital experiences helping billions of people live, work, and play every day. With the world's most distributed compute platform from cloud to edge we make it easy for customers to develop and run applications, while we keep experiences closer to users and threats farther away.
Join us
Are you seeking an opportunity to make a real difference in a company with a global reach and exciting services and clients? Come join us and grow with a team of people who will energize and inspire you!
#LI-Remote
Skills Required
- 8+ years of software engineering expertise
- Experience with distributed systems and cloud services
- Advanced proficiency in Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures
- Experience in building scalable, high-performance systems
- Experience in designing and operating API platforms
- Expertise in observability and monitoring for distributed systems
Akamai Technologies Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Akamai Technologies and has not been reviewed or approved by Akamai Technologies.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Unlimited PTO in the U.S., wellness days, paid volunteering time, and the FlexBase model contribute to broad time‑off flexibility. These practices are described as supporting strong work‑life balance.
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Parental & Family Support — Generous paid parental leaves, paid family care leave, subsidized backup childcare, and inclusive family‑building benefits via Carrot form a comprehensive family support suite. Coverage spans fertility support through caregiving resources.
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Retirement Support — A 401(k) with a substantial company match and immediate vesting, plus Roth and Mega Backdoor Roth options, underpin long‑term savings. These features provide reliable long‑term savings opportunities.
Akamai Technologies Insights
What We Do
At Akamai, we make life better for billions of people, billions of times a day. Every moment, billions of people, all over the world, are using the internet to shop, play games, look after finances, learn remotely, share videos, connect across the world, and so much more. These life-shaping digital experiences wouldn’t be possible without Akamai. We power and protect life online. It’s an extraordinary mission, and our global teams achieve it by solving the toughest challenges, and turning the impossible into the possible. With the world’s most distributed compute platform — from cloud to edge — we make it easy for businesses to develop and run applications, while we keep experiences closer to users and threats farther away. That’s why innovative companies worldwide choose Akamai to build, deliver, and secure their digital experiences. Thanks to our world’s most distributed platform for cloud computing, security, and content delivery. Akamai keeps applications and experiences closer and threats farther away. Devoted, determined problem-solvers who share a passion for technology, we’re always pushing ground-breaking ideas and driving innovation. Do you want to power and protect life online, by solving the toughest challenges with us? Be part of an amazing team!
Why Work With Us
Our people are devoted, determined problem-solvers who share a passion for technology. We find solutions through persistence, and push ground-breaking ideas forward with urgency and courage. This creates an environment where we harness creative energy and drive innovation. We are inclusive and diverse, and we love to collaborate across the world.
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