Job Description

We're seeking a full-time Software Engineering Manager for our Strategic Projects team. Reporting into our co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, this team exists to show developers and organizations why Tailscale should be their default connectivity substrate, both for internal infrastructure and for embedding into customer-facing products. Aperture, our identity-aware LLM gateway, is one such initiative.

This is an AI-native team. We use coding agents heavily as a force multiplier and expect a manager to be a power user and a coach for others. Our customers demand a high bar on code quality, security, and operational rigour, and we treat that as a reason to use every tool available, including LLMs and coding agents, to ship fast without compromising it.

As Engineering Manager you will mentor a small team of senior engineers; partner with the CSO, PM, and reference customers to turn market signals (particularly around AI infrastructure, agentic tooling, and identity-aware networking) into shippable POCs and reference architectures; provide technical direction on prototypes and integrations, many of which become public artifacts (blog posts, reference repos, conference demos, customer integrations); and help grow the organization through hiring, culture, and process.

Tailscale is fully remote, this team operates with significant ambiguity, and the shipping cadence is fast. Comfort working asynchronously and collaborating with highly technical customers is essential.

Key Responsibilities

• Manage a talented, senior team of experienced engineers in a growth-stage startup.
• Drive business outcomes measured by adoption of new platform primitives, customer integrations landed, and influence on Tailscale's roadmap.
• Make major design decisions on prototypes that often graduate into production surface area, and own the quality bar for the team's externally-visible artifacts (reference architectures, open source, talks, customer integrations).
• Set the bar for how this team uses AI coding tools: which agents and workflows the team adopts, what review and security practices wrap around agent-generated code, and how the team sustains a fast cadence without lowering the production bar.
• Hire, nurture, and oversee engineers while fostering a fun, creative, and inclusive atmosphere, including healthy conflict and a culture of candid, kind feedback.
• Collaborate across core platform engineering, security, and go-to-market on projects that span domains and often involve direct customer co-development.
• Drive planning across horizons, balancing fast prototype cycles against longer-arc bets on where connectivity, identity, and AI infrastructure are converging.
• Light travel required (~10-15%): primarily team and company onsites, with occasional conferences or customer visits concentrated in North America with potential trips to EU or APAC.

What We Are Looking For

• Substantial experience managing and mentoring engineering teams: performance, career development, hiring, and culture
• Experience developing in Go, the primary language across Tailscale's stack and this team's prototypes
• Heavy daily use of coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) and LLMs in your engineering workflow, with a point of view on where they accelerate work, where they fail, and how to wrap them in review and security practices that hold the production bar. Able to coach engineers on your team to operate the same way
• Comfort with exploratory, customer-facing engineering: translating customer conversations into prototypes and reference designs
• Comfort with the cadence of a strategy team at an early-ish startup: priorities shift with market signal, prototype-to-production timelines are short, and the bar on what ships stays high regardless

Nice to Have

• Building applications on top of LLMs and agentic systems (not just using them as dev tools)
• Networking background (L4-L7 connectivity, browser and DNS behaviors), and familiarity with Tailscale itself
• Identity infrastructure background: IdP platforms, identity sync/provisioning, directory services, and protocols (OAuth, OIDC, SAML, SCIM); access control models (RBAC/ABAC), session management, MFA, passwordless auth
• Leading teams whose output is publicly visible (open source, devrel, reference implementations) and validating prototype code for production alongside security teams

As a company, we strive to maintain fair and equitable compensation practices within our team across all roles and all levels. Tailscale's compensation package includes base salary, equity, and comprehensive benefits. The salary range displayed on each job posting represents the target range for a new hire's base salary. Individual offers may vary based on experience and skill set.