Software Engineer III/Senior, Agent

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:

• 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

Still reading? Good. There's more below worth your time.

 

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.

What You’ll Actually Do

• 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.

You Might Be a Great Fit If…

• 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

Extra credit if you’ve worked on:

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

Tech Stack

ngrok runs entirely on AWS. Engineers develop by using remote development tools and/or ssh to connect to remote EC2 environments that run a full Kubernetes cluster of the ngrok stack, closely mirroring production. The codebase is primarily Go and TypeScript. We use Postgres for persistence, Kafka for streaming, Protobuf for service boundaries, and Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, and Buildkite to operate and ship reliably. React is used for user interfaces, and GitHub supports our development workflows and remembers everything.

Location

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 A