Platform Engineer - Content Protection

Build, operate and continuously improve WAF signals, policies and rules that detect and mitigate automated scraping, content extraction and abusive traffic.

Own the lifecycle of traffic protection controls including design, testing, deployment, tuning, validation and retirement.

Implement rate-limiting, bot-management and traffic-shaping strategies aligned to business objectives and platform requirements.

Ensure protection controls are effective without negatively impacting legitimate discoverability, accessibility or customer experience.

Turn analytical signals and intelligence into practical enforcement controls and measurable operational outcomes.

Lead response activities relating to scraping, automated abuse, enumeration and traffic-related incidents.

Maintain operational playbooks and runbooks for detection, escalation, mitigation and recovery.

Implement controls using staged rollout approaches, balancing risk reduction with customer impact.

Monitor effectiveness of controls and continually improve protection capabilities.

Own the day-to-day technical relationship with Fastly MSS and associated content protection tooling.

Review, validate and operationalise Fastly recommendations and outputs.

Work with Fastly to maximise value from platform capabilities and identify future improvement opportunities.

Coordinate changes with stakeholders and communicate impacts, dependencies and implementation plans.

Partner closely with the Data Analyst to operationalise detection signals and validate outcomes.

Work with SEO teams to ensure legitimate crawlers and discovery services remain appropriately supported.

Support Product and Platform teams with traffic-aware architectural decisions.

Help define organisational policies relating to acceptable, non-desirable and malicious automated access.

Contribute to future approaches for managing AI agents, machine access and emerging content consumption models.

Build strong relationships with Managed Services vendor, Product, Platform Engineering, SEO and Analytics stakeholders.

Develop an understanding of existing WAF configurations, controls and operating processes.

Review recent incidents and identify immediate improvement opportunities.

Begin establishing operational playbooks and governance processes.

Establish repeatable workflows for traffic anomaly detection and response.

Create clear ownership and decision-making processes for content protection activities.

Reduce engineering involvement in reactive mitigation activities.

Deliver measurable improvements in response capability and operational readiness.

Operate a mature content protection capability integrated into platform operations.

Develop trusted partnerships with Fastly and internal stakeholders.

Improve protection against both high-volume and slow accumulation content extraction techniques.

Lay the foundations for managing AI-driven and agentic access patterns at scale.

Help Springer Nature balance discoverability, content protection and future commercial opportunities.

Experience with Fastly, Signal Sciences, edge compute or similar technologies.

Experience working alongside security operations or managed security services teams.

Experience with entitlement, identity or access-management systems.

Understanding of SEO, crawler behaviour and digital discoverability ecosystems.

Experience in academic publishing, research platforms or content-rich digital businesses.

Experience working with emerging AI, agentic or machine-access use cases.

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