platform engineer for content protection

Springer Nature provides researchers, educators, clinicians, and other professionals with access to knowledge through books, journals, platforms, and technology solutions. Its content reaches millions of people globally, while the company works to keep knowledge discoverable and protected.

• Build, operate, and continuously improve WAF signals, policies, and rules to 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 with business objectives and platform requirements;
• Ensure protection controls do not negatively impact legitimate discoverability, accessibility, or customer experience;
• Turn analytical signals and intelligence into practical enforcement controls and measurable operational outcomes;
• Lead response activities for 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 that balance risk reduction with customer impact;
• Monitor control effectiveness and continuously 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 platform capabilities and identify future improvement opportunities;
• Coordinate changes with stakeholders and communicate impacts, dependencies, and implementation plans;
• Partner with the Data Analyst to operationalise detection signals and validate outcomes;
• Work with SEO teams to support legitimate crawlers and discovery services;
• Support Product and Platform teams with traffic-aware architectural decisions;
• Help define organisational policies for acceptable, non-desirable, and malicious automated access;
• Contribute to approaches for managing AI agents, machine access, and emerging content consumption models;
• Build 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;
• Establish 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 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.

• Hands-on WAF engineering experience, ideally with Fastly Next-Gen WAF (Signal Sciences) or equivalent platforms;
• Experience implementing bot management, rate limiting, and traffic management controls;
• Experience responding to scraping, DDoS, automated abuse, or similar traffic-management incidents;
• Strong understanding of HTTP, TLS, CDN, and edge technologies;
• Ability to balance security, operational, and business considerations when designing controls;
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills;
• Nice to have: 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.

• No conditions specified