Engineering Manager

About the Agent Team

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.

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What You’ll Actually Do

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.

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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

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Tech Stack

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 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.

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Location

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.

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Sponsorship

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

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.

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Compensation

Engineering Manager: $225,000 – $275,000

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.

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