Software Engineer, Engineering Tooling at Tailscale

This role is ideal for a mid-level engineer who enjoys building "the tools that build the product." You should have a strong foundation in backend systems and i

Work type: remote

Location: Remote (United States)

Salary: $181,000 – $226,000/yr

Type: Full-time

Summary

This role is ideal for a mid-level engineer who enjoys building "the tools that build the product." You should have a strong foundation in backend systems and infrastructure, particularly with CI/CD pipelines, distributed systems, and observability. While the core stack is Go-heavy, the team values a "DevOps mindset"—someone who takes pride in improving developer productivity and internal workflows. The compensation is highly competitive for a mid-level role ($181k–$226k plus equity), especially for a fully remote position. Tailscale offers standout benefits, including 26 weeks of parental leave from day one, a $1,000 home office stipend, and a $1,500 annual professional development budget. It’s a great opportunity to join a high-growth, remote-first company with a strong engineering culture and minimal bureaucracy. **You might be a good fit if you...** * Have experience managing CI/CD, secrets, and infrastructure-as-code. * Are proficient in Go (or are a strong backend engineer willing to master it). * Enjoy collaborating directly with other engineering teams to solve their pain points. * Comfortably navigate networking concepts like IP addressing and routing.

Job Description

About Tailscale

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.

Job Description

We’re seeking a skilled and diligent full-time software engineer to join our growing team. You will work as part of the engineering team to:

• Support and enable internal business units through shared engineering services and functionalities, building the tools and processes for those teams to succeed.

• Build relationships with multiple stakeholders across the organization to understand and meet their needs with projects you'll own end to end.

• Work directly with internal customer-facing teams to empower their mission and take pride in making their day-to-day lives easier. Work with product engineering to extract the data needed to drive business decisions.

• Introducing new developer tooling to increase engineering productivity

• Improving existing tools, such as CI/CD

• Using information from production data to surface potential issues

• Creating tooling for dev and staging environments

Key Responsibilities

• Work as part of a team of engineers to design, build, test, and document core software components.

• Exhibit ownership over the running services that comprise Tailscale’s product by building for observability, participating in incident response, and fielding customer support escalations.

• Analyze and improve efficiency, scalability, and stability of various system resources.

• Experience with CI/CD, secrets management, infrastructure as code, and/or observability

• Experience with developer tooling or developer experience

• Experience with distributed systems

• Familiarity with networks (IP addressing, routing, etc.)

• Most of the non-front-end portions of the system are developed in the Go programming language. Experience with Go is a plus.

• Familiarity with one or more SQL databases is considered a plus

• Ability to give and process constructive feedback, as well as work independently

• Flexibility to adjust to the dynamic nature of a startup

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

US Pay Range
$181,000—$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!What We Offer

• An inclusive, flexible environment where you can be your authentic self. We recognize the impact of diverse voices and backgrounds on the growth of our people, product, and company. And that flexibility in how and when you work empowers our team to integrate work and life.

• A competitive total compensation package. This includes a base salary, an equity incentive plan and variable commission (for quota-based roles).

• Comprehensive group benefits with no waiting period.Take advantage of coverage for health, vision, dental, and more for you and your family!

• Remote first company—most of our teams work fully remotely. Enjoy a change of scenery wherever you can get wifi, participate in virtual and in-person social events, and leverage our corporate co-working program to visit WeWork (or other similar spaces near you). Some roles require in-office collaboration depending on team needs, which will be clearly noted in the job description.

• Connect with other Tailscalars IRL.Attend our annual company retreat, participate in team off-sites, and collaborate in person with teammates across Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. We support intentional in-person connection through team travel and distributed collaboration.

• Support for your personal and professional development. Grow your career thoughtfully with $1500 USD annually for professional development, or take advantage of mentorship, coaching, and internal promotion opportunities.

• Paid time off and a healthy work-life integration.Our flexible, paid time off program supports you for any situation life throws your way, whether moving homes or travelling the world!

• A build-your-own home office setup.You choose your own company-owned laptop (Mac or PC), receive a monthly home internet reimbursement, and $1000 USD to customize your workstation to make it your own.

• Generous parental leave program from your first day.We care about your life outside of work and encourage new parents to take advantage of parental leave top-ups for up to 26 weeks.

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