Engineering Manager, Strategic Projects

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Lead a skilled, senior team of experienced engineers within a rapidly growing startup.

• Drive business success as measured by the adoption of new platform features, successful customer integrations, and impact on Tailscale's development roadmap.

• Make critical design choices on prototypes that frequently transition into production, while maintaining a high standard for the team's publicly-visible outputs (reference architectures, open source contributions, presentations, customer integrations).

• Establish standards for the team's use of AI coding tools: selecting which agents and workflows to implement, defining review and security practices for agent-generated code, and ensuring the team maintains a rapid pace without compromising quality.

• Recruit, mentor, and manage engineers while promoting a fun, creative, and inclusive work environment, encouraging healthy debate and a culture of open, constructive feedback.

• Collaborate with core platform engineering, security, and go-to-market teams on cross-domain projects, often involving direct co-development with customers.

• Oversee planning across various timeframes, balancing quick prototype iterations with long-term investments in areas where connectivity, identity, and AI infrastructure are converging.

• Light travel required (~10-15%): primarily for team and company onsite meetings, with occasional travel for conferences or customer visits, mainly within North America, with potential journeys to the EU or APAC.

⛳️ Requirements

• Significant experience in managing and mentoring engineering teams, including performance evaluations, career growth, hiring, and fostering team culture.

• Proficiency in Go, the primary programming language used across Tailscale's stack and within this team's prototypes.

• Extensive daily engagement with coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) and LLMs in your engineering processes, along with insights on their effectiveness, limitations, and how to integrate them into review and security practices that uphold production standards. Capable of guiding your team members to adopt similar practices.

• Comfort with exploratory, customer-facing engineering: translating customer interactions into prototypes and reference designs.

• Familiarity with the dynamics of a strategy team at an emerging startup: adapting to shifting priorities based on market signals, short prototype-to-production timelines, and maintaining high standards for deliverables.

🏝️ Benefits

• An inclusive, flexible environment where you can be your authentic self.

• A competitive total compensation package.

• Comprehensive group benefits with no waiting period.

• Remote-first company—most of our teams work fully remotely.

• Connect with other Tailscalars in real life.

• Support for your personal and professional development.

• Paid time off and a healthy work-life integration.

• A customizable home office setup.

• Generous parental leave program starting from your first day.