# Engineering Manager, Control Plane

**Company:** [Tailscale](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/tailscale)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Engineering Management
**Salary:** $206k – $257k/yr
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** Go, production services, on-call management, Incident Response, Mentorship, Team Leadership, performance evaluations, Recruiting, Cross-Functional Collaboration
**Posted:** 2026-07-29

> Lead and mentor teams of engineers building and operating Tailscale's critical Control Plane production services. Manage 2-3 product pods, provide technical direction, drive hiring and culture, and deliver business outcomes through cross-functional collaboration in a fully remote environment.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Provide guidance, mentorship, and career development for a team of software engineers.
- Contribute toward the success of our Product organization which includes Engineering, Product Management, and Design. Operate in Pods of 2-4 engineers plus a Product Manager and Designer; each Engineering Manager handles 2-3 such Pods.
- Pods work across the codebase to implement features, address shortcomings, and answer customer requests.
- Provide technical direction in projects as needed, and grow the technical leadership capabilities of the engineers reporting to you.
- Help grow the organization: interviewing and recruiting, guiding the development of the engineering culture, developing processes as we grow.
- Achieve significant business outcomes through cross-functional collaboration with product managers, data scientists, and designers.
- Help your team improve their performance and the quality of their work; make major design decisions.
- Hire, nurture, and oversee a team of engineers while fostering an atmosphere of psychological well-being, embracing diversity and promoting inclusion.
- Lead a team responsible for managing a critical production service, including operational concerns (monitoring, alerting, on call, etc).
- Manage healthy conflict by moderating design discussions and cultivating a positive culture of feedback with candor and kindness.
- Collaborate with interdisciplinary teams across the organization to complete complex projects spanning multiple technical domains.
- Drive planning across multiple time horizons, from immediate tactical needs to long-term strategic direction.

## Requirements
- Experience as a people manager.
- Demonstrated leadership with substantial experience in managing and mentoring Engineering teams, including performance evaluations, career development, and fostering a collaborative work environment.
- Background building and operating production services with high availability and performance targets.
- Expertise managing on call rotations and incident response.
- Highly technical manager, able to independently evaluate complex technical tradeoffs in design conversations while leaning on experts in the team for design and implementation.
- Experience developing in Go, used for much of the system.
- Ability to give and process constructive feedback, as well as work independently.
- Flexibility to adjust to the dynamic nature of a startup.

## Nice-to-Haves
- Comfort working asynchronously in a fully remote, early-stage company.

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