At ngrok, we believe that doing networking the right way should also be the easy way. Over the last 10 years, we’ve given developers and engineers simple interfaces for getting traffic into their apps and APIs without forcing them to deal with legacy proxies, external load balancers, or VPNs, and we’re now part of the standard stack for more than 9 million developers at some of the world’s top technology brands, like GitHub, Okta, HashiCorp, and Twilio.
Over the last few years, we’ve completely changed how that interface looks and works to make it easier, more composable, and infinitely flexible. We now give anyone who needs a “front door” to their apps or APIs powerful tools to orchestrate traffic, secure public endpoints, accelerate their services on a global network, observe all traffic passing to/from their network, and much more. The ngrok that millions love and trust has been completely transformed for the better.
As a Senior/Staff Software Engineer on the Agent Team, you’ll shape the backbone of how developers securely connect their applications to the internet. You’ll design and evolve the Agent—the lightweight, high-performance binary at the heart of ngrok—improving performance, security, and reliability at global scale.
In this role, you’ll take ownership of critical systems in the agent and endpoint space, balancing deep technical challenges with developer experience. You’ll influence architecture, guide technical strategy, and mentor teammates, all while ensuring that tens of millions of requests seamlessly reach their destinations through ngrok.
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. 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.
What You’ll Do- Lead the design and implementation of new capabilities for the agent and tunnel components: SDKs, proxies, endpoint integrations, performance optimizations, observability, etc.
- Improve reliability, scalability, and performance of agent-to-endpoint communication: reduce latency, improve resource usage, make deployments rock solid.
- Help define and enforce security best practices in the agent: proper handling of secrets, mTLS/tls, certificate authorities, etc.
- Shape developer experience around agent setup, configuration, debugging, error handling, and monitoring. Ensure that onboarding is smooth and usage is intuitive.
- Participate in a shared on-call rotation: respond to real production incidents, diagnose complex cross-system issues, define postmortems, push forward reliability improvements.
- Advocate for long-term technical investments: modularization, testability, observability, etc. Help define roadmap trade-offs (short term vs long term).
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building production software.
- Deep experience in a systems language such as Go, Rust, Java, or C/C++
- Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, networking, TLS/mTLS, proxying, load balancing, etc.
- Demonstrated ability to design and build for scale: working with high throughput, many concurrent connections, reliability under load.
- Hands-on experience with observability tooling: metrics, tracing, logs; ability to instrument systems and chase down performance bottlenecks.
- Strong sense of developer experience: making APIs or binaries that are well-documented, robust in diverse environments, easy to configure and deploy.
- Skilled at navigating ambiguity, trade-offs, and technical risk. Able to balance speed of delivery with long-term maintainability.
- Excellent collaborating skills: working with peers, cross-disciplinary teams, stakeholders; ability to explain trade-offs, influence technical direction.
- Experience mentoring and elevating the work of others; setting engineering standards, code reviews.
- Bonus / pluses: exposure to SDK design/distribution, embedded or agent‐based software, security or secrets management, experience with local tunneling / proxying, or AI / high-traffic edge use cases, experience working with Open-Source Software as a maintainer or developer.
Senior Software Engineer
Tier 1 (SF, LA, Seattle, NYC): Minimum salary of $180,000 to maximum $225,000
Tier 2 (rest of US): Minimum salary of $166,000 to maximum $207,000
Staff Software Engineer
Tier 1 (SF, LA, Seattle, NYC): Minimum salary of $200,000 to maximum of $250,000
Tier 2 (rest of US): Minimum salary of $184,000 to maximum $230,000
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.
#LI-Remote
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All candidates must be US-based, and legally authorized to work in the United States.
If your experience is close but doesn’t fulfill all requirements, please apply. ngrok is on a mission to build a special company. To achieve our goal, we are focused on hiring people with different backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences!
BenefitsCompensation for this role depends on level, but we provide a competitive mix of salary and equity.
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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