Engineering Manager (Strategic Projects)

Role Overview

Engineering Manager for the Strategic Projects team at Tailscale. You will mentor a small team of senior engineers, drive business outcomes through roadmap influence and major design decisions, and collaborate across core platform engineering, security, and go-to-market.

Responsibilities

• Mentor and manage a small team of senior engineers; provide technical direction on prototypes and integrations.
• Drive business outcomes by influencing the team roadmap and making major design decisions on prototypes.
• Collaborate cross-functionally across core platform engineering, security, and go-to-market on projects spanning multiple domains.
• Shape the team’s AI coding workflow, including how to use coding agents/LLMs effectively and safely.
• Lead exploratory, customer-facing engineering, turning customer conversations into prototypes and reference designs.
• Validate prototype code for production readiness alongside security teams.
• Foster a fun, creative, and inclusive team culture; operate effectively in ambiguity with fast shipping cadence.

Requirements

• Experience managing and mentoring engineering teams (performance, career development, hiring, culture).
• Heavy daily use of coding agents and LLMs (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor or similar), with a point of view on where they help vs. fail.
• Ability to wrap AI-assisted work in review and security practices that maintain production quality.
• Developing in Go (primary language for Tailscale stack and prototypes).
• Comfort with exploratory prototyping and customer-facing engineering.
• Ability to operate with strategy-team cadence: priorities shift with market signal and timelines are short while the bar for what ships remains high.
• Experience building applications on top of LLMs and agentic systems (not just using them as dev tools).
• Identity infrastructure background, including IdP platforms and identity provisioning/sync plus protocols such as OAuth, OIDC, SAML, SCIM; also access control (RBAC/ABAC), session management, MFA, and passwordless auth.
• Networking background (L4–L7 connectivity, browser and DNS behaviors) and familiarity with Tailscale.
• Experience leading teams whose output is publicly visible (open source, devrel, reference implementations).

Nice-to-haves

• Strong security collaboration experience to ensure prototypes meet production bar.
• Demonstrated impact on publicly visible technical projects and reference implementations.