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Role Description

We own ngrok’s core gateway layer — the infrastructure that sits between the internet and everything our customers run. Every request, response, retry, and timeout passes through here. Our job is to make sure that traffic is:

• Routed exactly where it’s supposed to go
• Secured correctly, every time
• Allowed or blocked for reasons we can explain
• Rate-limited and shaped without surprises
• Observable when something inevitably goes sideways

What You’ll Actually Do:

• Build and operate the gateway core: You’ll work on the services every ngrok request passes through. They’re very fast, very hot, and have extremely high standards.
• Design routing and security primitives everyone depends on: You’ll build low-level policy, routing, and validation systems used across the platform—making sure bad configs fail fast and don’t accidentally DDoS the internet.
• Debug distributed systems in the wild: You’ll chase bugs caused by timing, load, and incorrect assumptions. Expect metrics, traces, packet captures, and the occasional “how is this even possible?”
• Ship infrastructure people sleep on (in a good way): You’ll build simple, durable systems and clean abstractions that other teams rely on daily—while thinking about blast radius, safety, and rollbacks more than flashy demos.

Qualifications

• You’re comfortable in Go, Rust, C/C++, or Java (bonus points for Go)
• You’ve built networking, proxy, or infrastructure systems in production
• You understand TLS/mTLS
• You enjoy systems that are invisible until they’re not
• You’re passionate about building primitives other teams depend on
• You’ve said “this needs to be rock solid” and meant it literally

• Extra credit if you’ve worked on:
• Gateways, proxies, or edge platforms
• Security-critical infrastructure
• Multi-tenant networking systems
• Config-heavy systems that must never surprise users
• Anything described as “simple” in the original proposal

Requirements

• ngrok runs entirely on AWS.
• Engineers develop by SSH’ing into 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.

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 for birth, up to 8 weeks for new parents (birth, adoption, fostering).
• Annual professional development budget for books, courses, conferences, or whatever helps you level up.
• Co-working space stipend if you want to get out of your house but aren't near our SF office.
• 2x+ free lunches per week for employees onsite at our San Francisco office.
• Company offsites twice a year.
• Bi-annual reviews to ensure real feedback and competitive compensation.