Engineering Manager

Engineering Manager

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 Git Hub, Okta, Hashi Corp, 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.

This role will lead Agent team. Our 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.

When it works, nobody thinks about it.

When it doesn't, it's immediately obvious — and very public.

Lead a team that ships and learns quickly

You'll manage and coach a team of 5–7 engineers. The goal isn't just shipping—it's building a team that can consistently make good decisions, move fast, and improve over time.

Treat management like a systems problem (with humans in the loop)

You'll design how your team works: planning, execution, retros, feedback loops, and decision-making. You'll tune the system, not just react to it.

Stay close enough to the code to matter

You won't be coding every day, but you'll get into the details when needed—reviewing designs, debugging tricky issues, and helping the team make better technical tradeoffs.

Drive product and technical direction together

This isn't "just execution." You'll help shape what the team builds—balancing product work, technical investments, and experiments that actually teach you something.

Build a team people want to be on

You'll coach junior and senior engineers, create psychological safety, and raise the bar on both performance and collaboration.

Connect the team to the bigger picture

You'll make sure your team understands how their work ties to ngrok's product, customers, and business. Context isn't optional here. You'll work closely with senior leadership and functional orgs to shape and meaningfully impact company culture and roadmap.

You Might Be a Great Fit If…

• You've spent 5+ years as a software engineer and comfortable in Go, Rust, Java, or C/C++
• You have 4+ years of engineering leadership experience
• You think in systems—whether that's distributed systems or team dynamics
• You're comfortable zooming in (code, debugging) and zooming out (strategy, org design)
• You've built things from scratch—teams, processes, or products
• You communicate clearly, directly, and without unnecessary fluff

Bonus points if you've:

• Contributed to open source, blogs, or conferences
• Worked in developer tools or product-led growth environments
• Built teams in ambiguous, early-stage contexts

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 Type Script. 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 Git Hub supports our development workflows and remembers everything.

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.

All candidates must be US-based,…