Engineering Manager, Control Plane - Tailscale

About Tailscale

Tailscale is making safe connection effortless by delivering software that makes it easy to securely interconnect people and their devices. We're building a future for the Internet that's easy, sensible, and safe. Founded in 2019 and fully distributed, we are backed by Accel, CRV, Insight, Heavybit, and Uncork Capital.

About the Role

We’re seeking a talented and motivated full-time Software Engineering Manager to join our growing team. You will provide guidance, mentorship, and career development for a team of software engineers. You will contribute to our Product organization, working in Pods of 2-4 engineers, a Product Manager, and a Designer. Each Engineering Manager typically handles 2-3 such Pods.

Key Responsibilities

• People Management: Hire, nurture, and oversee a team of engineers while fostering psychological well-being, diversity, and inclusion.
• Technical Leadership: Provide technical direction, make major design decisions, and grow the technical leadership capabilities of your reports.
• Operational Excellence: Lead a team responsible for managing a critical production service, including monitoring, alerting, and on-call rotations.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Achieve business outcomes by collaborating with product managers, data scientists, and designers.
• Strategic Planning: Drive planning across multiple time horizons, from tactical needs to long-term strategic direction.
• Culture: Manage healthy conflict, moderate design discussions, and cultivate a positive culture of feedback.

What We Are Looking For

• Substantial experience in managing and mentoring engineering teams (performance evaluations, career development).
• Background building and operating production services with high availability and performance targets.
• Expertise managing on-call rotations and incident response.
• Ability to independently evaluate complex technical tradeoffs.
• Experience developing in Go.
• Comfort working asynchronously and ability to think on your feet.

What We Offer

• Competitive total compensation package including base salary and equity.
• Comprehensive group benefits (health, vision, dental) with no waiting period.
• Employer-funded retirement contributions (matching up to 0.75% of eligible compensation).
• Flexible, paid time off program.
• Paid parental leave (20 weeks for birthing parents, 16 weeks for non-birthing).
• $1500 USD annually for professional development.
• Home office setup: Company-provided laptop, monthly internet reimbursement, and $500 USD for workstation customization.
• Remote-first culture with corporate co-working program and intentional in-person connection through team travel and retreats.