Product Manager, Tailscale

• 8+ years in product management with meaningful time owning a platform or infrastructure product — SaaS control planes, API platforms, cloud infrastructure, identity systems, or similar
• Experience turning infrastructure architecture decisions into product requirements: what availability to promise, what consistency tradeoffs are acceptable, how to write SLA language that's honest about limitations
• Comfortable in technical conversations about distributed systems — consistency models, large-scale migrations, the tradeoffs that come with replication
• Has shipped products that enterprise customers depend on for their operations, and understands what it takes to earn and keep that trust
• Can move decisions across teams that don't report to you, on infrastructure that everyone has opinions about
• Knows how to talk to IT administrators, security engineers, and CISOs — and can turn what you hear into a strategy that both the engineering team and the sales team believe in
• 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!

Desirable

• We are seeking a Principal Product Manager to own Tailscale's control plane. At its core is the coordination server — the authoritative source of network state. It distributes public keys, ACL policies, and node addresses so devices can find and authenticate each other directly. It carries no user traffic; it just makes the mesh possible. See How Tailscale Works
• The control architecture is being rebuilt for high availability, global scale, and zero-downtime operations — a long-term program that affects every team, every customer, and every future product
• The right person will define the product requirements that guide the HA architecture: multi-tenancy models, what SLAs to commit to, what consistency tradeoffs customers can accept, what the deployment experience looks like during transition, and how the platform evolves from where it is today to where it needs to be
• You'll report to the VP Product, Ross Kukulinski, partner directly with the engineering lead for the control plane, and coordinate across the Control Plane, Identity, and Infrastructure teams as they execute in parallel
• Set the vision and roadmap for the control plane: coordination server, compliance, and the management API
• Define what "done" looks like at each phase of our HA & vertical scaling efforts from a customer and business perspective: availability targets, consistency requirements, SLA language, and how we communicate honestly during the transition
• Shape the multi-tenancy evolution — what it means for MSPs managing hundreds of customer networks, OEM partners provisioning tailnets, and enterprises segmenting by business unit, including data residency and isolation requirements
• Push for user experiences to be API-first: every user experience action available via API, which is both what enterprise customers need and the prerequisite for MSP portals, OEM integrations, and Terraform providers
• Keep the HA program moving across Control Plane, Identity, and Infrastructure — sequencing decisions, surfacing tradeoffs, making sure the business and customer perspectives are represented
• Work with GTM, Customer Success, and Security on the compliance and administration gaps that stall deals with regulated-industry customers