Software Engineer II/III/Senior, Gateway

ngrok Inc. • San Francisco, CA

21h • Hybrid

About The Position

About ngrok Inc.
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. Doesn’t matter if they’re sharing localhost or running AI workloads in production.
We're trusted by more than 9 million developers at companies like GitHub, Okta, HashiCorp, and Twilio. What started as a way to put your local app on a public URL has grown into a universal gateway for API delivery, AI inference, device fleets, and site-to-site connectivity. It’s the same ngrok that millions of developers have loved and leaned on every day for years, now with the power to run production traffic at scale.
A few things you should know:
Our mascot is a rock
We are obsessed with our pets, Viper sunglasses and Bufo (yes, the toad)
We have a designated Chief Emoji Officer - they are vital to our success!
We like software that’s serious and culture that’s not
Most people skim to 'requirements' and bounce. You're actually reading this. That's the kind of thoroughness we respect, or you're just procrastinating. Either way, same same and you should keep reading.
About the Gateway Team
We own ngrok’s core gateway layer — the infrastructure that sits between the internet and everything our customers run.
Every request, response, retry, and timeout passes through here.
Our job is to make sure that traffic is:
Routed exactly where it’s supposed to go
Secured correctly, every time
Allowed or blocked for reasons we can explain
Rate-limited and shaped without surprises
Observable when something inevitably goes sideways
What You’ll Actually Do
Build and operate the gateway core: You’ll work on the services every ngrok request passes through. They’re very fast, very hot, and have extremely high standards.
Design routing and security primitives everyone depends on: You’ll build low-level policy, routing, and validation systems used across the platform—making sure bad configs fail fast and don’t accidentally DDoS the internet.
Debug distributed systems in the wild: You’ll chase bugs caused by timing, load, and incorrect assumptions. Expect metrics, traces, packet captures, and the occasional “how is this even possible?”
Ship infrastructure people sleep on (in a good way): You’ll build simple, durable systems and clean abstractions that other teams rely on daily—while thinking about blast radius, safety, and rollbacks more than flashy demos.

Requirements

• You’re comfortable in Go, Rust, C/C++, or Java (bonus points for Go)
• You’ve built networking, proxy, or infrastructure systems in production
• You understand TLS/mTLS
• You enjoy systems that are invisible until they’re not
• You passionate about building primitives other teams depend on
• You’ve said “this needs to be rock solid” and meant it literally

Nice To Haves

• Gateways, proxies, or edge platforms
• Security-critical infrastructure
• Multi-tenant networking systems
• Config-heavy systems that must never surprise users
• Anything described as “simple” in the original proposal

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the gateway core: You’ll work on the services every ngrok request passes through. They’re very fast, very hot, and have extremely high standards.
• Design routing and security primitives everyone depends on: You’ll build low-level policy, routing, and validation systems used across the platform—making sure bad configs fail fast and don’t accidentally DDoS the internet.
• Debug distributed systems in the wild: You’ll chase bugs caused by timing, load, and incorrect assumptions. Expect metrics, traces, packet captures, and the occasional “how is this even possible?”
• Ship infrastructure people sleep on (in a good way): You’ll build simple, durable systems and clean abstractions that other teams rely on daily—while thinking about blast radius, safety, and rollbacks more than flashy demos.

Benefits

• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed