Senior Software Engineer

About ngrok

ngrok is an all‑in‑one cloud networking platform that secures, transforms, and routes traffic to services running anywhere. Instead of cobbling together nginx, NLBs, VPNs, model routers, and oodles of other tools, developers solve every networking problem with one gateway. It’s trusted by more than 9 million developers at companies like GitHub, Okta, HashiCorp, and Twilio.

About the AI Gateway Team

The AI Gateway team builds the systems that define how AI traffic is identified, controlled, and understood as it passes through ngrok. We own the AI‑specific control plane at the gateway layer: policies, usage tracking, and enforcement that sit directly on live customer traffic. Our systems must behave correctly under real‑world conditions—traffic spikes, unexpected model behavior, misconfigured policies, and customers asking “Why was this blocked?” or “Where did my tokens go?”

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve the AI Gateway: work on AI‑aware gateway components that classify and handle AI traffic in real time. The code runs directly in the request path and must be fast, safe, and predictable.
• Own AI traffic policy enforcement: design and implement AI Gateway Traffic Policy Objects—rate limits, usage caps, and access rules specific to AI workloads.
• Track AI usage and token consumption: build and maintain systems that accurately measure AI usage—requests, tokens, and related metadata.
• Make AI behavior observable and explainable: expose clear, trustworthy signals around AI traffic (what was allowed or blocked, which policies applied, how usage accumulated).
• Design abstractions that hide complexity: work with product and design to build AI‑specific gateway primitives that feel intentional and safe.
• Ship systems customers trust in production: collaborate with Gateway, Customer Data, and Platform teams to ensure AI usage data, policy enforcement, and billing signals line up.

Requirements

• Comfortable in a statically typed, compiled language such as Go, Rust, C++, or Java (bonus points for Go)
• Experience with AI/LLMs and an appreciation for their unique edge‑cases
• Care about developer experience and thoughtful abstractions
• Enjoy defining system behavior, not just plumbing
• Have thought about retries, limits, and costs before being asked
• Like systems that move complexity from the user to the system

Extra credit

• AI platforms or inference infrastructure
• API gateways with product‑level opinions
• Usage limits, quotas, or billing‑adjacent systems
• Customer‑facing observability tools

Tech Stack

• AWS (entirely)
• Primary languages: Go and TypeScript
• Persistence: Postgres
• Streaming: Kafka
• Service boundaries: Protobuf
• Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, Buildkite
• UI: React
• Development workflow: GitHub

Location

• Remote position for candidates outside the Bay Area
• Hybrid role for candidates within commuting distance to San Francisco (office attendance on Tuesdays and Wednesdays)

Sponsorship

• All candidates must be US‑based and legally authorized to work in the United States
• No visa sponsorship is available for this position

Compensation

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

Compensation is evaluated based on qualifications, internal equity, market data, and location, and includes a mix of salary and equity.

Benefits

• Full premiums covered on base healthcare, dental, and vision for employees; half covered for dependents; mental health and well‑being support
• 401(k) with 100 % match up to 3 % of salary and 50 % match up to an additional 2 %
• Open, flexible vacation policy (actual flexible time off)
• Parental leave: up to 16 weeks for birth, up to 8 weeks for other new parents (birth, adoption, fostering)
• Annual professional development budget for books, courses, conferences, etc., plus an annual home office/desk stipend
• Co‑working space stipend for remote workers who prefer an office environment
• Free lunch (2×+ per week) for onsite employees at the San Francisco office
• Company offsites twice a year (part strategy, part bonding)
• Bi‑annual performance reviews and fair compensation with regular feedback

#LI-Remote