Product Manager, Control Plane

<div class="content-intro"><p><strong>About Tailscale </strong></p> <p>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.</p></div><p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Job Description</strong></span></p> <p>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 <a href="https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works#the-control-plane-key-exchange-and-coordination">How Tailscale Works</a>.</p> <p>Tailscale's growth has pushed this architecture hard. The coordination service is now serving over 3 million simultaneously connected nodes, and the reliability challenges that come with that scale are not a secret — our CEO, Avery, has written about them publicly (<a href="https://tailscale.com/blog/hypergrowth-isnt-always-easy">Hypergrowth Isn't Always Easy</a>). On top of the coordination layer sits everything enterprises need to run Tailscale at scale: access policy, device trust, identity management, audit logging, compliance, multi-tenancy, and the API layer that administrators, partners, and developers use to automate and govern their tailnets.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Key Responsibilities</strong></span></p> <ul> <li>Set the vision and roadmap for the control plane: coordination server, compliance, and the management API</li> <li>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</li> <li>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</li> <li>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</li> <li>Keep the HA program moving across Control Plane, Identity, and Infrastructure — sequencing decisions, surfacing tradeoffs, making sure the business and customer perspectives are represented</li> <li>Work with GTM, Customer Success, and Security on the compliance and administration gaps that stall deals with regulated-industry customers</li> </ul> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>What We Are Looking For</strong></span></p> <ul> <li>8+ years in product management with meaningful time owni ... (truncated, view full listing at source)