Software Engineer III/Senior, Agent

ngrok Inc. • San Francisco, CA

6d • $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 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.
About the Agent Team
Our Agent team builds the software that sits at the edge of every ngrok connection. The Agent is what developers install, run, embed, and trust to expose their systems securely to the internet.
It’s the first thing customers touch and the last thing we want to debug at 3am.
The Agent must be fast, correct, and predictable under hostile conditions: flaky networks, broken configs, expired certs, overloaded laptops, CI environments held together by duct tape, and production traffic that does not care about your feelings.
When it works, nobody thinks about it.
When it doesn’t, it’s immediately obvious — and very public.

Requirements

• You’ve built systems-level software that had to work under pressure
• You’re comfortable in Go, Rust, C/C++, or Java (bonus points for Go)
• You enjoy debugging things that “shouldn’t be possible”
• You think deeply about reliability, security, and performance
• You can reason about tradeoffs and explain them like a normal human
• You care about developer experience — not just correctness
• All candidates must be US-based, and legally authorized to work in the United States.
• Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States on a permanent, ongoing basis without the need for current or future sponsorship.

Nice To Haves

• Networking, proxies, or agents
• SDKs or embeddable runtimes
• Observability tooling
• Open-source systems people actually use

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve the ngrok Agent itself: You’ll work on the core agent that handles connection management, tunneling, authentication, and secure traffic forwarding. This is a high-performance networking system that must behave correctly across a wide range of environments and failure modes.
• Own reliability at the edge: You’ll design for latency, throughput, and correctness under real-world chaos—network partitions, transient failures, misconfiguration, and resource-constrained machines. When something goes wrong, the Agent should fail clearly, safely, and explainably.
• Develop SDKs and embeddable integrations: You’ll build and maintain SDKs and embedded agent components that other systems and products depend on. These need to be easy to integrate, hard to misuse, and stable over time.
• Make the system observable: You’ll improve diagnostics, logging, and metrics so we can understand what the Agent is doing in the wild. When customers ask “what happened?”, you’ll help make sure we can answer with facts instead of guesses.
• Ship software that runs everywhere: The Agent runs on developer laptops, servers, CI systems, containers, and occasionally very questionable hardware. You’ll ensure it behaves consistently across platforms and environments.
• Work with people who care about correctness: You’ll collaborate closely with product, platform, and support teams. When something breaks, you’ll help explain why. When something is confusing, you’ll help make it boring.

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.

What This Job Offers

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