Frontend Engineer

Key Responsibilities

• Define and drive the frontend architecture for Tailscale’s next-generation console, including application structure, routing, state boundaries, shared abstractions, and long-term maintainability
• Design and maintain cross-origin authentication and session infrastructure between the console and other services, including auth flows, CORS policies, CSRF protections, cookie/session strategies, and support for multiple deployment environments
• Build and operate a frontend serving platform capable of hosting multiple Tailscale products under a unified development workflow
• Establish shared infrastructure, conventions, and design patterns that consolidate distinct product experiences into a cohesive console platform
• Create frontend architecture patterns, tooling, and abstractions that enable non-frontend engineers to build accessible, production-quality UI safely and efficiently
• Partner closely with Product Design to turn complex infrastructure and identity concepts into intuitive user experiences
• Collaborate with Growth, Design, Product, and other engineering teams on experimentation and iteration, including A/B testing, analytics instrumentation, and feature rollout strategies
• Define and improve frontend testing strategy across the console, including integration testing, end-to-end coverage, local developer ergonomics, and abstractions that reduce testing complexity for product teams
• Work with infrastructure and engineering tooling teams to improve local development workflows, build pipelines, preview deployments, release ergonomics, and operational reliability
• Raise the quality bar for frontend engineering across Tailscale through technical leadership, reviews, mentoring, and clear platform guardrails
• Required participation in on-call rotation every few weeks

Requirements

• Deep experience building and operating production React applications at scale
• Strong understanding of web platform fundamentals, including HTTP semantics, browser security boundaries, authentication flows, cookies, storage, CORS, and CSRF
• Experience building internal platforms, frameworks, or shared libraries that enable other teams to ship products with strong guardrails
• Experience driving a unified console or platform vision across disparate frontend codebases
• Strong judgment around frontend architecture: knowing when to standardize, when to abstract, and how to keep systems understandable as they grow
• Experience designing scalable frontend testing strategies that improve confidence while hiding incidental complexity from product engineers
• Comfort collaborating across disciplines and functions, especially with design, growth, infrastructure, and developer tooling
• Strong written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain tradeoffs and influence technical direction across teams
• A high degree of ownership and autonomy, with the ability to identify important problems and drive them through ambiguity

Nice to Have

• Experience designing frontend codebases and tooling optimized for AI-assisted development, including conventions and abstractions that help LLM-based agents produce correct, consistent UI with fewer iterations
• Experience with design systems, component libraries, and connecting design tooling to production UI workflows
• Experience with feature flagging, analytics, experimentation systems, and progressive delivery patterns
• Experience working on identity, admin, B2B SaaS, or security-sensitive product surfaces