Manager, Solutions Engineering - Enterprise

Job Description

We are looking for a Manager, Solutions Engineering – Enterprise & Mid-Market to join our rapidly growing team. The Solutions Engineering team partners with customers across the full lifecycle - from pre-sales through post-sales - by helping design, evaluate, and operationalize Tailscale in complex enterprise environments. This role exists to raise the quality of enterprise execution: better discovery, tighter technical evaluations, and clearer articulation of why Tailscale actually matters in a real-world architecture.

The team works closely with Sales, Support, and Product, and collaborates deeply with Engineering and Marketing so customer feedback doesn’t disappear into a backlog. As Manager of Solutions Engineering, you will act as a true player-coach: showing up on important deals, coaching experienced SEs in real moments, and setting a high bar for how enterprise engagements should be run.

If you care about people leadership, enjoy being close to the technology, and want to stay customer-facing while building a high-performing team of smart, self-sufficient solutions engineers, we should talk.

Key Responsibilities

• Manage and grow a small, senior team by coaching on live deals, developing judgment and technical depth, and hiring people who make the team better - not just bigger.
• Set and uphold a high standard for enterprise discovery, technical evaluations, and successful rollouts that directly impact new customer acquisition and expansion.
• Partner closely with Sales as a credible technical counterpart on complex enterprise opportunities, helping shape deal strategy, architecture, and execution quality.
• Collaborate across Tailscale to improve how we run proofs of concept, explain technical value, and turn real customer feedback into product direction.
• Provide clear, actionable feedback to Product and Engineering grounded in concrete customer use cases and enterprise constraints (not hypotheticals).
• Stay current on cloud, DevOps, networking, and security trends, and help the team continue sharpening both technical instincts and communication skills.

What We Are Looking For

• Experience leading people, ideally as a working manager who still enjoys being in the details
• Experience in a technical, enterprise customer-facing role such as Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer, or similar
• Clear, confident, opinionated communication skills—you can explain complex systems simply, read the room, and land a point without over-explaining
• Solid understanding of networking and security fundamentals, including cloud environments such as AWS VPCs and Azure virtual networks
• Hands-on technical background with experience in developer tooling, DevOps principles, and modern cloud architectures (CI/CD, infrastructure, APIs)
• Ability to explain Tailscale’s value in your own words, grounded in customer outcomes and technical trade-offs rather than marketing language