Software Engineer III/Senior, Agent
About the role
The 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.
Responsibilities
- Build the next-generation ngrok agent: The agent's architecture has recently undergone a significant redesign. You'll build on that foundation to ship a class of features (networking, integrations, remote management) that weren't possible before.
- 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.
- 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.
Requirements
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
Qualifications
- Experience building systems-level software that had to work under pressure
- Comfortable in Go, Rust, C/C++, or Java (bonus points for Go)
- Enjoy debugging things that “shouldn’t be possible”
- Think deeply about reliability, security, and performance
- Can reason about tradeoffs and explain them like a normal human
- Care about developer experience — not just correctness
Skills
- Experience with networking, proxies, or agents
- Experience with SDKs or embeddable runtimes
- Experience with observability tooling
- Experience with open-source systems
Benefits
- Full premiums covered on base healthcare, dental, and vision for you and your dependents
- Mental health and well-being support included
- Retirement matching that doesn't suck
- Annual professional development budget for books, courses, conferences, or whatever helps you level up
- An annual home office/desk stipend to make your workspace not terrible
- 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)
Pay
- 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): $165,500 – $202,400
Schedule
- 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.