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Tailscale is seeking a Principal Product Manager to lead its dataplane platform—the critical infrastructure layer that carries customer traffic and delivers fast, secure, reliable connectivity. The dataplane currently serves over 7 million monthly active devices and spans open-source and commercial technologies including the Tailscale client, DERP relays, subnet routers, WireGuard, exit nodes, peer relays, and app connectors.
In this role, you will set the vision and roadmap for the entire dataplane, ensuring connectivity feels automatic and reliable for users ranging from hobbyists to multinational enterprises. Key responsibilities include defining performance and reliability as customer-facing product requirements, owning connectivity product strategy end-to-end (regional expansion, capacity planning, relay health observability, enterprise DERP offerings, and regulated deployment requirements), and driving the roadmap for operational primitives like subnet routers, exit nodes, and peer relays.
You will own the application-layer connectivity surface—app connectors, services, DNS, and network segmentation—that determines how traffic reaches its destination and how AI agents, CI/CD pipelines, and Kubernetes workloads access SaaS and cloud resources. You'll also own the operator control surface, defining how network engineers and IT admins configure, segment, monitor, and troubleshoot networks at scale via the admin console and CLI.
Additionally, you will partner closely with design and engineering teams to turn abstract networking systems into legible product surfaces, own connectivity behavior across diverse NAT types, operating systems, mobile carriers, and enterprise firewalls, and represent Tailscale's dataplane externally to enterprise customers, cloud partners, and the networking community.
This role reports directly to Tailscale's VP Product and requires 10+ years of product management experience 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). You must demonstrate deep networking fluency across the stack—comfortable with routing, NAT traversal, MTU/MSS, congestion, latency, and packet loss at lower layers, and equally fluent at the application layer on overlay routing, proxies, DNS, and network segmentation. Proven ability to define performance commitments, customer-facing SLOs, and operate under real production expectations is essential.
About Tailscale
AI / Data / Infrastructure; SaaS / Enterprise Software — secure networking platform built on WireGuard.
