Full-stack Software Engineer III/Senior, AI Gateway

About ngrok Inc.

ngrok builds developer infrastructure to connect services and AI models, wherever they run.

Most developers know us as the way to put localhost on the internet. More than 15 million of them use ngrok, at companies like GitHub, Okta, HashiCorp, and Twilio. It's the same ngrok they've loved and leaned on for years, now with the power to run production traffic at scale.

Teams use ngrok to deliver APIs, connect to their customers' networks, manage device fleets, and route traffic between public and local AI models.

Across all of it, we hold ourselves to one standard: developers should be able to finish a whole job without becoming experts in every system it touches. We take on the complexity, make thoughtful choices by default, and keep developers in control of what matters to them.

A few things you should know:

• Our (unofficial) mascot is a shrimp. Yes, we make the puns.
• We have a designated Chief Emoji Officer, and the role is vital to our success.
• We like software that's serious and culture that's not.
• Our competitive advantage is that we're having fun.

Still reading? Good. There's more below worth your time.

About the AI Gateway Team

Our 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?”

What You’ll Actually Do

• Build and evolve the AI Gateway: You’ll work on the AI-aware gateway components that classify and handle AI traffic in real time. This code runs directly in the request path and must be fast, safe, and predictable.
• Own AI traffic policy enforcement: You’ll design and implement AI Gateway Traffic Policy Objects-rate limits, usage caps, and access rules specific to AI workloads. These policies exist to prevent runaway costs, misuse, and accidental exposure without breaking legitimate traffic.
• Track AI usage and token consumption: You’ll build and maintain systems that accurately measure AI usage-requests, tokens, and related metadata-so customers can understand how their AI systems behave and what they’re consuming.
• Make AI behavior observable and explainable: You’ll expose clear, trustworthy signals around AI traffic: what was allowed or blocked, which policies applied, and how usage accumulated. When customers ask “what happened?”, the gateway should already know.
• Design abstractions that hide complexity: You’ll work with product and design to build AI-specific gateway primitives that feel intentional and safe, without leaking provider quirks or infrastructure details into customer workflows.
• Ship systems customers trust in production: You’ll collaborate closely with Gateway, Customer Data, and Platform teams to ensure AI usage data, policy enforcement, and billing signals line up-so customers can turn these features on with confidence.

You Might Be a Great Fit If…

• You’re comfortable in a statically typed, compiled language such as Go, Rust, C++, or Java (with bonus points for Go)
• Experience in frontend engineering, including expertise in TypeScript, React, HTML, CSS.
• You’ve worked with AI/LLMs and can appreciate their unique brand of edge-cases
• You care about developer experience and thoughtful abstractions
• You enjoy defining system behavior, not just plumbing
• You’ve thought about retries, limits, and costs before being asked
• You like systems that move complexity from the user to the system

Extra credit if you’ve worked on:

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

Tech Stack

ngrok runs entirely on AWS. Engineers develop by using remote development tools and/or ssh to connect to remote EC2 environments that run a full Kubernetes cluster of the ngrok stack, closely mirroring production. The codebase is primarily Go and TypeScript. We use Postgres for persistence, Kafka for streaming, Protobuf for service boundaries, and Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, and Buildkite to operate and ship reliably. React is used for user interfaces, and GitHub supports our development workflows and remembers everything.

Location

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.

Sponsorship

All candidates must be US-based, and legally authorized to work in the United States.

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.

Compensation

Senior Software Engineer

• Tier 1 (SF, LA, Seattle, NYC): $202,500 - $247,500
• Tier 2 (rest of US): $186,300 - $227,700

Software Engineer III

• Tier 1 (SF, LA, Seattle, NYC): $180,000 - $220,000
• Tier 2 (rest of US): $165,600 - $202,400

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.

Full Time Employee Benefits

• Health stuff that actually matters. Full premiums covered on base healthcare, dental, and vision for you. Half covered for your dependents. Mental health and well-being support included, because taking care of your brain is as important as taking care of your teeth.
• Retirement matching that doesn't suck. 401(k) with 100% match up to 3% of your salary and 50% match up to another 2%. Future you will appreciate present you.
• Actually flexible time off. We say "open, flexible vacation policy" and actually mean it. Take the time you need. Your manager will bug you if you're not taking enough.
• Parental leave that's realistic. Up to 16 weeks if you give birth, up to 8 weeks for new parents (birth, adoption, fostering-however your family grows).
• Money to keep growing. Annual professional development budget for books, courses, conferences, or whatever helps you level up. Plus an annual home office/desk stipend to make your workspace not terrible.
• Work from wherever. Co-working space stipend if you want to get out of your house but aren't near our SF office.
• Lunch on us. 2x+ per week for employees onsite at our San Francisco office. Free food tastes better.
• Company offsites. Twice a year we get the whole team together. It's part strategy, part bonding, part excuse to hang out with Bufo (the toad).
• Regular feedback and fair compensation. Bi-annual reviews to make sure you're getting real feedback and staying competitively compensated. No surprises, no waiting around for performance conversations.