Full-stack Software Engineer III/Senior, AI Gateway San Francisco, CA

ngrok, Inc.; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

ngrok, Inc. is looking for a Full-stack Software Engineer III/Senior to join the AI Gateway team. You will build and evolve AI-aware gateway components, delivering fast, safe code in Go or TypeScript while collaborating with product, design, and platform teams.

You will own AI traffic policy enforcement, usage tracking, and observability, ensuring production-grade systems that scale and handle real-world traffic. This remote/hybrid role adapts for SF Bay Area commuting patterns.

Qualifications

• Experience with statically typed, compiled languages (Go, Rust, C++, Java).
• Frontend experience with TypeScript, React, HTML, CSS.
• Familiarity with AI/LLMs and edge-case handling.
• Strong focus on developer experience and thoughtful abstractions.
• Ability to define system behavior, retries, limits, and costs.

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve the AI Gateway and its AI-aware gateway components.
• Own AI traffic policy enforcement: rate limits, usage caps, access rules.
• Track AI usage, tokens, and related metadata for customers.
• Make AI behavior observable and explainable with trustworthy signals.
• Design abstractions that hide complexity while remaining safe for customers.
• Ship production-ready systems in collaboration with Gateway, Customer Data, and Platform teams.

Skills

Go

Rust

C++

Java

TypeScript

React

HTML

CSS

AI/LLMs

Observability

Tools

Postgres

Kafka

Protobuf

Kubernetes

Terraform

Helm

Buildkite

Go

TypeScript

Job description

Full-stack Software Engineer III/Senior, AI Gateway

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 AI Gateway Team

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?”

What You’ll Actually Do

• 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.
• You’re comfortable in a statically typed, compiled language such as Go, Rust, C++, or Java (with bonus points for Go)
• Experience in frontend engineering, including expertise in TypeScript, React, HTML, CSS.
• 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

Extra credit if you’ve worked on:

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

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 Area employees commute to the office on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Spons