At ngrok, we believe that doing networking the right way should also be the easy way. Over the last 10 years, we’ve given developers and engineers simple interfaces for getting traffic into their apps and APIs without forcing them to deal with legacy proxies, external load balancers, or VPNs, and we’re now part of the standard stack for more than 9 million developers at some of the world’s top technology brands, like GitHub, Okta, HashiCorp, and Twilio.
Over the last few years, we’ve completely changed how that interface looks and works to make it easier, more composable, and infinitely flexible. We now give anyone who needs a “front door” to their apps or APIs powerful tools to orchestrate traffic, secure public endpoints, accelerate their services on a global network, observe all traffic passing to/from their network, and much more. The ngrok that millions love and trust has been completely transformed for the better.
As a Software Engineer on the AI Gateway Team, you’ll be shaping the foundation of how developers and enterprises securely connect their applications through ngrok. This role gives you the chance to design and implement distributed systems that enforce policies, manage trust, and deliver advanced endpoint capabilities—all at global scale.
You’ll work on challenges that demand both technical depth and creativity: building high-performance distributed systems that route traffic with millisecond precision, securing sensitive workloads, and enabling the next generation of AI-driven applications. Every line of code you ship will directly influence how developers build, secure, and scale their most critical services on ngrok.
This is a remote position for candidates outside of the Bay Area and a hybrid role for candidates within commuting distance to San Francisco. Our Bay Area employees commute to the office on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. At this time, ngrok is unable to provide visa sponsorship for this position. Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States on a permanent, ongoing basis without the need for current or future sponsorship.
What You’ll Do- Build and evolve the gateway services that handle traffic routing, policy enforcement.
- Implement new traffic policy objects (e.g., secrets, IP rules, mTLS/CA policies) to give customers fine-grained control over their applications.
- Extend and optimize endpoint services that provide reliability and observability for developers.
- Partner with product, platform, and security teams to ensure traffic management is robust, scalable, and enterprise-ready.
- Write clean, high-quality, well-tested code and participate in thoughtful design/code reviews.
- Investigate and resolve production issues across distributed systems.
- Continuously improve the developer experience—simplifying how teams configure, secure, and scale their traffic.
- Contribute to the evolution of shared infrastructure, tools, and libraries across ngrok.
- Have 3+ years of experience writing high-quality production software in Go or languages like Rust, C, Java, or C++.
- Understand networking and distributed systems fundamentals (protocols, TLS/mTLS, proxies, load balancers, traffic shaping).
- Have experience building AI gateways, reverse proxies, API gateways, or working with AI/ML service traffic.
- Are motivated by building scalable, performant systems that developers love to use.
- Enjoy working at the intersection of infrastructure, security, and developer tooling/experience.
- Value pragmatism—delivering solutions that balance complexity with simplicity and maintainability.
Senior Software Engineer
- Tier 1 (SF, LA, Seattle, NYC): $180,000 – $225,000
- Tier 2 (rest of US): $165,600 – $207,000
Software Engineer III
- Tier 1 (SF, LA, Seattle, NYC): $160,000 – $200,000
- Tier 2 (rest of US): $147,200 – $184,000
Job level and actual compensation will be evaluated based on factors including, but not limited to, qualifications objectively assessed during the interview process (including skills and prior relevant experience, potential impact, and scope of role), internal equity with other team members, market data, and specific work location. We provide an attractive mix of salary and equity.
#LI-Hybrid
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All candidates must be US-based, and legally authorized to work in the United States.
If your experience is close but doesn’t fulfill all requirements, please apply. ngrok is on a mission to build a special company. To achieve our goal, we are focused on hiring people with different backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences!
BenefitsCompensation for this role depends on level, but we provide a competitive mix of salary and equity.
We provide a 401(k) with a 100% match up to 3% of your salary and a 50% match up to another 2%.
We provide healthcare, dental, and vision with premiums fully covered on the base plan for employees. Half of premiums are covered for dependents.
We offer unlimited PTO and a culture in which the overwhelming majority of employees take more than four weeks. Your manager is also on the hook for encouraging you to do the same.
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ngrok is simplified, API-first ingress-as-a-service trusted by over 5M developers to get their apps online faster and keep security happy. With one line of code, developers get instant ingress to services with authentication, observability, and other critical controls. All without provisioning legacy proxies, load balancers or VPNs. ngrok’s simplicity has made it a de-facto standard tool among developers, and the world’s top brands — including GitHub, Okta, Shopify, and Twilio — recommend it throughout their documentation.
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