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

Job description

• 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?”

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

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

Skills

Required

• Go
• Rust
• C++
• Java
• TypeScript
• React
• HTML
• CSS
• AI/LLMs
• Developer experience
• Abstractions
• Retries, limits, and costs

Preferred

• AI platforms or inference infrastructure
• API gateways with product-level opinions
• Customer-facing observability tools

Benefits

• Health stuff that actually matters. Full premiums covered on base healthcare, dental, and vision for you. Half covered for your dependents. Mental health and well-being support included, because taking care of your brain is as important as taking care of your teeth.
• Retirement matching that doesn't suck. 401(k) with 100% match up to 3% of your salary and 50% match up to another 2%. Future you will appreciate present you.
• Actually flexible time off. We say "open, flexible vacation policy" and actually mean it. Take the time you need. Your manager will bug you if you're not taking enough.
• Parental leave that's realistic. Up to 16 weeks if you give birth, up to 8 weeks for new parents (birth, adoption, fostering—however your family grows).
• Money to keep growing. Annual professional development budget for books, courses, conferences, or whatever helps you level up. Plus an annual home office/desk stipend to make your workspace not terrible.
• Work from wherever. Co-working space stipend if you want to get out of your house but aren't near our SF office.
• Lunch on us. 2x+ per week for employees onsite at our San Francisco office. Free food tastes better.
• Company offsites. Twice a year we get the whole team together. It's part strategy, part bonding, part excuse to hang out with Bufo (the toad).
• Regular feedback and fair compensation. Bi-annual reviews to make sure you're getting real feedback and staying competitively compensated. No surprises, no waiting around for performance conversations.
• Senior Software Engineer
• Tier 1 (SF, LA, Seattle, NYC): $202,500 – $247,500
• Tier 2 (rest of US): $186,300 – $227,700
• Software Engineer III
• Tier 1 (SF, LA, Seattle, NYC): $180,000 – $220,000
• Tier 2 (rest of US): $165,600 – $202,400
• 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.