Engineering Manager, Strategic Projects

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

Requirements

• 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

Benefits

• Base salary, equity incentive plan
• Comprehensive group benefits (health, vision, dental)
• $1,500 USD annually for professional development
• Flexible, paid time off
• $1,000 USD home office setup budget + monthly internet reimbursement
• Generous parental leave (up to 26 weeks top-up)