Platform Engineer - Content Protection
About the role
Springer Nature is a global publisher whose imprints, books, journals, platforms and technology solutions reach millions of people and has operated for over 175 years.
The Platform Engineer — Content Protection sits in the Off-platform Discovery and Content Protection team and converts analytical insight and strategy into operational traffic-management and content-protection controls to preserve discoverability while protecting content, platform performance and future business models.
Responsibilities
- Design, implement and operate WAF-based protections and traffic controls, managing their full lifecycle and ensuring they stop abuse without harming legitimate discoverability or user experience.
- Lead incident response for scraping, automated abuse and traffic incidents; maintain playbooks/runbooks and use staged rollouts to balance risk and customer impact.
- Manage the technical relationship with Fastly MSS and related tooling, validate and operationalise vendor recommendations, and coordinate stakeholder communication for changes.
- Collaborate with Data, SEO, Product and Platform teams to operationalise detection signals, support legitimate crawlers, advise on traffic-aware architecture and help define policies for automated access.
- Initial (1–3 months): build relationships with managed services and internal stakeholders, learn current WAF configurations, review incidents and start operational playbooks and governance.
- Short-term (3–6 months): create repeatable detection and response workflows, define ownership for content protection and reduce reactive engineering effort.
- Medium-term (6–12 months): operate a mature, integrated content protection capability, strengthen Fastly and internal partnerships, improve defences for varied extraction techniques and prepare for AI/agentic access at scale.
Requirements
Essential: hands-on WAF engineering experience (ideally Fastly Next-Gen WAF / Signal Sciences), bot-management and rate-limiting implementation, incident response for scraping/DDoS/automated abuse, plus strong HTTP, TLS, CDN and edge knowledge and stakeholder communication skills.
Preferred qualifications
Desirable (optional): experience with Fastly, Signal Sciences or edge compute; working with security operations or managed security services teams; entitlement, identity or access-management systems; understanding of SEO and crawler behaviour; experience in academic publishing or content-rich platforms; experience with emerging AI or agentic machine-access use cases.
Skills
Required skills: HTTP, TLS, CDN and edge technologies; balancing security, operational and business trade-offs; and strong stakeholder communication.
Benefits
Springer Nature states a commitment to inclusion and will make necessary accommodations for candidates with access needs related to disability, neurodivergence or chronic conditions.
Company context
Springer Nature describes itself as a long-established global publisher whose brands, imprints and platforms reach researchers, educators and professionals worldwide.
The company highlights a responsibility to keep knowledge discoverable and protected as AI and agentic technologies reshape research access.
Relevant source disclaimer
If you have access needs related to disability, neurodivergence or a chronic condition, contact Springer Nature to request necessary accommodations.
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