Software Engineer III/Senior, AI Gateway

ngrok Inc.•San Francisco, CA

12h•$147,200 - $225,000•Hybrid

About The Position

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 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. 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?”

Requirements

You’re comfortable in a statically typed, compiled language such as Go, Rust, C++, or Java (with bonus points for Go)
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

Nice To Haves

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

Responsibilities

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.

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.

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