The paper presents coastal structures design in the presence of waves by the minimization of a cost function. It aims to show that shape optimization can be efficiently applied to ocean engineering. This is an underlying guiding principle for the design of harbors or offshore breakwaters. We compute the solution of a specific simplified boundary value problem describing the short wave propagation toward a vertical sea cliff or vertical wall and modify accordingly the shape of defense structures in order to minimize a pre-defined cost function taking into account the strength (energy) of the water waves. The optimization procedure relies on a global semi-deterministic search algorithm able to escape from local minima.