Infrastructure Engineer
Job description
About the role
Tailscale is looking for a focused Software Engineer to join the infrastructure team and own the systems that keep our business units moving. In this capacity, you will be responsible for designing and maintaining the internal platforms that provide visibility, reliability, and automation across the organization. You will work directly with stakeholders to translate operational needs into robust infrastructure solutions that remove friction from daily workflows. The role requires a proactive mindset to manage the full lifecycle of systems, from initial design through deployment and ongoing optimization. You will leverage modern tooling to ensure our infrastructure is efficient, observable, and scalable in a cloud-native environment. Collaboration is central to this position, as you will partner with multiple engineering groups to align on long-term infrastructure strategies. Ultimately, you will ensure that the foundational systems we rely on are secure, performant, and easy to use for everyone in the company.
Key facts
What you'll do
- Implement observability frameworks that capture metrics, logs, and traces to provide deep insight into system health.
- Construct and optimize continuous deployment pipelines to accelerate the delivery of reliable software updates.
- Define and manage infrastructure as code configurations that provision and govern cloud resources consistently.
- Lead cross-functional initiatives with other engineering teams to build shared infrastructure capabilities and standards.
- Streamline the automation of updates for both managed services and virtual machines to reduce manual overhead.
- Author clear documentation and specifications for software components to ensure maintainability and knowledge sharing.
- Assume responsibility for production services, driving incident response efforts and improving runbooks for resilience.
- Evaluate resource utilization patterns and architect solutions that improve efficiency, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.
- Contribute to the development and maintenance of tools that enable developers to self-provision infrastructure safely.
- Ensure network configurations adhere to best practices, supporting secure and reliable communication between services.
- Monitor service level objectives and key performance indicators to guide data-driven infrastructure improvements.
- Evaluate and integrate new technologies that enhance the reliability and developer experience of our platform.
- Partner with security teams to ensure infrastructure changes meet compliance and organizational risk requirements.
- Mentor junior engineers on infrastructure best practices and contribute to a strong engineering culture.
Requirements
- Bring a minimum of 2 years of hands-on experience with CI/CD systems, secrets management solutions, infrastructure as code tools, and observability platforms.
- Demonstrate prior experience operating distributed systems and understanding the challenges they introduce.
- Show practical experience running managed services inside a cloud environment, with AWS being a strong advantage.
- Possess a solid grasp of networking fundamentals, including IP addressing, subnets, and routing concepts.
- Exhibit the ability to give and accept constructive feedback while working independently with minimal supervision.
- Prove adaptability to the fast pace and evolving priorities of a startup environment.
- Communicate effectively in writing and speaking to ensure clarity and alignment across teams.
- Have a strong sense of ownership and accountability for the systems you build and operate.
- Follow established best practices for version control, testing, and documentation in all infrastructure work.
- Collaborate respectfully with colleagues and engage actively in team discussions and code reviews.
Nice to have
- Hands-on experience operating Kubernetes clusters in a production environment.
- Prior work with the Go programming language contributing to backend services or tools.
Practical notes
Salary range: $181,000 - $226,000 USD
Tailscale offers a competitive compensation package including base salary, equity, and comprehensive benefits with no waiting period. Benefits include health, vision, dental, employer-funded retirement contributions (matching up to 0.75% of eligible compensation), professional development budget ($1500 USD annually), paid time off, home office setup allowance ($500 USD), and paid parental leave (20 weeks for birthing parents, 16 weeks for non-birthing parents).
The company is remote-first and supports distributed collaboration with opportunities for virtual and in-person events, including an annual company retreat and team off-sites.
AI-assisted tools are used in the hiring process, but all hiring decisions are made by people.
Legitimate communications from Tailscale will originate from @tailscale.com, @greenhouse.io, and @interviews.modernloop.io email addresses.