Software Engineer, Strategic Projects

Ideal candidates will have experience iteratively developing software in startup-like environments.

We don't expect expertise with every aspect listed below.

Strong at rapid prototyping, explaining technical concepts, and working directly with customers in an exploratory, fast-paced environment.

Go experience is a must; comfort integrating third-party APIs; basic networking.

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.

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.

$163,000

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$226,000 USD

Frequently cited statistics show that people who identify with historically marginalized groups are likely to apply to jobs only if they meet 100% of the qualifications.

We encourage you to help us break that statistic!

Join our Strategic Projects team, reporting to the team's Engineering Manager and ultimately into our co-founder and  Chief Strategy Officer.

This team exists to show developers and organizations why Tailscale should be their default connectivity substrate, both for internal infrastructure and for embedding into customer-facing products.

Aperture, our identity-aware LLM gateway, is one such initiative.

We use coding agents heavily as a force multiplier and expect every engineer to be a power user.

Our customers demand a high bar on code quality, security, and operational rigour, and we treat that as a reason to use every tool available, including LLMs and coding agents, to ship fast without compromising it.

You will build prototypes and POCs, work directly with reference customers on integrations, and produce externally-visible artifacts (blog posts, reference repos, conference demos, customer integrations) that demonstrate how Tailscale's emerging platform solves real problems in AI infrastructure, agentic tooling, and identity-aware networking.

Tailscale is building the new Internet by delivering software that makes it easy to securely interconnect people and their devices, no matter where they are. From hobbyists to multinational corporations, teams of every size use Tailscale each day to protect their networks, share access to internal tools, and more. We're building a future for the Internet that's easy, sensible, and safe, like it used to be. Founded in 2019 and fully distributed, we're backed by Accel, CRV, Insight, Heavybit, and Uncork Capital.