Tailscale
SoftwareEngineer,StrategicProjects
Neural analysis suggests this role is
optimal for Mid+ candidates.
“Software Engineer, Strategic Projects at Tailscale. Skills: AI, LLMs, networking, Go. Build prototypes and POCs. showcase Tailscale for AI agents”
What You'll Achieve.
show developers and organizations why Tailscale should be their default connectivity substrate; demonstrate how Tailscale's emerging platform solves real problems; turn customer conversations into shippable prototypes; prototypes that often graduate into Tailscale's product surface area
Industry & Context.
Light travel required (~10-15%), team and company onsites, occasional conferences or customer visits, North America, EU or APAC
What They're Looking For.
Must Have
iteratively developing software in startup-like environments, rapid prototyping, explaining technical concepts, working directly with customers in an exploratory, fast-paced environment, Go experience, integrating third-party basic networking, Heavy daily use of coding agents, LLMs in your engineering workflow, wrapping LLMs in review and security practices, Comfort with the cadence of a strategy team, priorities shift with market signal, prototype-to-production timelines are short, bar on what ships stays high, Thrive working independently in a remote environment
Nice to Have
Building applications on top of LLMs and agentic systems, Identity infrastructure, Validating prototype code for production use, Familiarity with Tailscale, networking challenges in multi-cloud and hybrid deployments, Open source community experience producing publicly-visible artifacts
What You'll Do.
Build prototypes and POCs
showcase Tailscale for AI agents
Work with reference customers
Create reference architectures
Rapidly iterate with input
turn customer conversations into prototypes
Hold the production bar on prototypes
security and review practices
How You'll Work.
Team & Collaboration
collaborating with highly technical customers; input from colleagues; collaborate with a small team; collaborate in person with teammates
Communication Scope
explaining technical concepts; share your work through documentation; community engagement; conference presentations
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 Join our Strategic Projects team, reporting to the team's Engineering Manager and ultimately 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 every engineer to be a power user. 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. You will build prototypes and POCs, work directly with reference customers on integrations, and produce externally-visible artifacts (blog posts, reference repos, conference demos, customer integrations) that demonstrate how Tailscale's emerging platform solves real problems in AI infrastructure, agentic tooling, and identity-aware networking. 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 Build prototypes and POCs that showcase Tailscale for AI agents and tooling (MCP gateways, LLM proxies, sandboxes, remote servers, and simi
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