For the record, this works on stereographic projections as well. Thank you so much for this code... made the transition to NCL for a few things much cleaner.

FYI, labeling grid lines is now supported on any cartopy projection as of cartopy v0.18. See https://twitter.com/QuLogic/status/1257148289838911488

amazing!

Modifying gridlines:

ax.gridlines(xlocs=xticks, ylocs=yticks, draw_labels=False, linewidth=0.5, color='k', alpha=0.5, linestyle='--')

Modifying tic_params:

ax.tick_params(axis='both',labelsize=6,direction='out',right=False,top=False)

That worked great! Thanks!
I just received the warning indicated below, let me know if this has been updated!
:50: DeprecationWarning: The outline_patch property is deprecated. Use GeoAxes.spines['geo'] or the default Axes properties instead.
outline_patch = sgeom.LineString(ax.outline_patch.get_path().vertices.tolist())