tailscale
Principal Product Manager (Dataplane)
At a Glance
- Location
- United States
- Work Regime
- remote
- Experience
- 10+ years
- Posted
- 2026-07-07T16:28:56-04:00
Key Requirements
Domain Knowledge
- Finance
- Government
- Healthcare
Benefits & Perks
salary, equity, and comprehensive benefits. The salary range displayed on each job
Requirements
10+ years in product management owning networking, transport, edge, or infrastructure products at scale: CDNs, edge platforms, SD-WAN, overlay networks, cloud networking, service mesh, API gateways, DNS/traffic management, or identity-aware proxies
Deep networking fluency across the stack: comfortable below the L4 on routing, NAT traversal, MTU/MSS, congestion, latency, and packet loss, and equally fluent at the application layer on overlay routing, proxies and connectors, DNS, and network segmentation — able to engage engineers on both teams as a peer
Demonstrated ability to define performance commitments and customer-facing SLOs, operate under real production expectations, and handle the moments when systems miss those commitments
Familiarity with VPN/tunneling protocols (WireGuard, IPsec, OpenVPN) or low-level networking stacks (kernel, eBPF, userspace)
Experience operating globally distributed infrastructure POPs, relays, and edge nodes including capacity planning, regional expansion, and the customer-visible performance tradeoffs that come with it
Familiarity with subnet routing, BGP, MPLS, cloud VPC peering, or data residency constraints
Responsibilities
We are seeking a Principal Product Manager to lead Tailscale's dataplane platform which is the critical layer that carries customer traffic and delivers the promise of "fast, secure, just works." This position will be responsible for driving forward open source & commercial technology spanning the Tailscale client, DERP, Subnet routers, WireGuard, Exit Nodes, Peer Relays, and App Connectors.
How NAT Traversal Works
Tailscale's growth has significantly expanded the scope and importance of the dataplane.
It now carries traffic for over 7 million monthly active devices (and growing rapidly!).
Tailscale has quickly moved beyond just a VPN to providing critical engineering and AI infrastructure.
Organizations depend not just on Tailscale to provide employee access to cloud environments - they also use Tailscale in the critical network path within and across their datacenters powering Humans, AI Agents, CI/CD workflows, and Kubernetes workloads.