Platform Engineer - Content Protection

Salary: £53,000 - 93,000 per year

Requirements:

• 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.
• Experience with Fastly, Signal Sciences, edge compute or similar technologies is desirable.
• Experience working alongside security operations or managed security services teams is desirable.
• Experience with entitlement, identity or access-management systems is desirable.
• Understanding of SEO, crawler behaviour and digital discoverability ecosystems is desirable.
• Experience in academic publishing, research platforms or content-rich digital businesses is desirable.
• Experience working with emerging AI, agentic or machine-access use cases is desirable.

Responsibilities:

• 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 are effective without negatively affecting legitimate discoverability, accessibility or customer experience.
• Turn analytical signals and intelligence into practical enforcement controls and measurable operational outcomes.
• Lead responses to scraping, automated abuse, enumeration and traffic-related incidents.
• Maintain operational playbooks and runbooks for detection, escalation, mitigation and recovery.
• Use staged rollout approaches for controls, balancing risk reduction with customer impact.
• Monitor control effectiveness and continually improve protection capabilities.
• Own the day-to-day technical relationship with Fastly Managed Security Services and associated content protection tooling.
• Review, validate and operationalise Fastly recommendations and outputs, and work with Fastly to maximise platform capabilities and identify improvements.
• 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 ensure legitimate crawlers and discovery services remain appropriately supported.
• 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, Product, Platform Engineering, SEO and Analytics stakeholders; understand existing WAF configurations and processes; review incidents and identify improvements.
• Establish operational playbooks, governance processes, repeatable workflows for traffic anomaly detection and response, and clear ownership and decision-making processes.
• Reduce engineering involvement in reactive mitigation and deliver measurable improvements in response capability and operational readiness.
• Develop a mature content protection capability integrated into platform operations, strengthen internal and Fastly partnerships, and improve protection against high-volume and slow-accumulation content extraction techniques.
• Lay the foundations for managing AI-driven and agentic access patterns at scale while balancing discoverability, content protection and future commercial opportunities.

Technologies:

• AI
• AI Agents
• HTTP
• Support
• Security
• WAF
• Incident Management
• Product Manager

More:

We are Springer Nature, and our imprints, books, journals, platforms and technology solutions reach millions of researchers, educators, clinicians and other professionals around the world. For over 175 years, our brands have been a trusted source of knowledge. As research discovery and consumption change, we aim to keep knowledge discoverable and protected. This full-time Platform Engineer – Content Protection role is part of our Off-platform Discovery and Content Protection team, working with analytics, product, security, SEO and platform engineering colleagues to turn content protection strategy into operational controls. The role is available in London, Berlin or Lisbon.

last updated 40 week of 2026