Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Agent

ngrok Inc.; United States; On-site; USD 166,000 - 225,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) matching

Healthcare, dental and vision insurance

Unlimited PTO

Job summary

A leading software development company is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design and enhance core systems that securely connect applications to the internet. This role requires expertise in systems languages and distributed systems, with a strong emphasis on performance, reliability, and security. Offering a competitive salary package with benefits including healthcare and unlimited PTO.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building production software.
• Deep experience in a systems programming language.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems and networking.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and implementation of new capabilities for the agent and tunnel components.
• Improve reliability, scalability, and performance of agent-to-endpoint communication.
• Define and enforce security best practices in the agent.

Skills

Software engineering experience

Systems language proficiency

Distributed systems knowledge

Networking skills

Security best practices

Developer experience focus

Collaboration skills

Tools

Go

Rust

Java

C/C++

Job description

The Opportunity

As a Senior 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).

What We’re Looking For

• 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.

Compensation

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

Job level and actual compensation will be evaluated based on factors including qualifications objectively assessed during the interview process (skills, prior relevant experience, potential impact, and scope of role), internal equity, market data, and work location. We provide an attractive 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.

All candidates must be US-based, and legally authorized to work in the United States.

Compensation for this role depends on level, but we provide a competitive mix of salary and equity.

Equal Employment Opportunity

We do not discriminate on the basis of any protected status. ngrok is committed to building a diverse and inclusive team.