Tailscale
EngineeringManager,StrategicProjects
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“Engineering Manager, Strategic Projects at Tailscale. Skills: Engineering management, AI tools, Customer-facing engineering. Manage senior engineers. Drive business outcomes”
What You'll Achieve.
Adoption of new platform primitives; Customer integrations landed; Influence on Tailscale's roadmap; Shippable POCs; Reference integrations
Industry & Context.
Light travel required (~10-15%), North America travel, EU or APAC travel potential
What They're Looking For.
Must Have
Substantial experience managing and mentoring engineering teams, Experience developing in Go, Heavy daily use of coding agents and LLMs, Comfort with exploratory, customer-facing engineering, Comfort with the cadence of a strategy team
Nice to Have
Building applications on top of LLMs and agentic systems, Networking background, Familiarity with Tailscale itself, Identity infrastructure background, Leading teams whose output is publicly visible
What You'll Do.
Manage senior engineers
Drive business outcomes
Make design decisions
Hire and nurture engineers
Collaborate across teams
Drive planning across horizons
How You'll Work.
Team & Collaboration
Partner with CSO, PM, and reference customers; Collaborate across core platform engineering, security, and go-to-market; Collaborate with highly technical customers; Collaborate asynchronously
Full Job Description
About Tailscale Tailscale is building the new Internet by delivering software that makes it easy to securely interconnect people and their devices, no matter where they are. From hobbyists to multinational corporations, teams of every size use Tailscale each day to protect their networks, share access to internal tools, and more. We're building a future for the Internet that's easy, sensible, and safe, like it used to be. Founded in 2019 and fully distributed, we're backed by Accel, CRV, Insight, Heavybit, and Uncork Capital. 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 hi
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