Software Engineer III/Senior, AI Gateway

ngrok Inc.•San Francisco, CA

1d•$165,600 - $247,500•Hybrid

About The Position

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?”

Requirements

Comfortable in a statically typed, compiled language such as Go, Rust, C++, or Java (with bonus points for Go)
Experience with AI/LLMs and can appreciate their unique brand of 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

Nice To Haves

Worked on AI platforms or inference infrastructure
Worked on API gateways with product-level opinions
Worked on usage limits, quotas, or billing-adjacent systems
Worked on 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

Full premiums covered on base healthcare, dental, and vision for you. Half covered for your dependents.
Mental health and well-being support included.
401(k) with 100% match up to 3% of your salary and 50% match up to another 2%.
Open, flexible vacation policy.
Up to 16 weeks parental leave if you give birth, up to 8 weeks for new parents (birth, adoption, fostering—however your family grows).
Annual professional development budget for books, courses, conferences, or whatever helps you level up.
Annual home office/desk stipend to make your workspace not terrible.
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.
Company offsites. Twice a year we get the whole team together.
Bi-annual reviews to make sure you're getting real feedback and staying competitively compensated.