Solutions Engineer - Commercial (West)

📋 Description

• • Join Tailscale as a Solutions Engineer on the Commercial team, owning the technical heartbeat of every deal in the western US. You will sit at the intersection of product, sales, and customer success, translating complex zero-trust networking concepts into clear business value for fast-growing startups, mid-market SaaS companies, and Fortune 1000 innovators.
• • Own the full pre-sales technical lifecycle—from first discovery call to signed contract and successful onboarding. You will demo Tailscale’s unique mesh VPN and device management platform, run proof-of-value pilots, and architect integration plans that map to each prospect’s security, compliance, and developer-productivity goals.
• • Partner directly with Account Executives to build account strategies, identify expansion whitespace, and craft ROI models that show how Tailscale cuts VPN costs, slashes setup time from weeks to minutes, and hardens security posture without extra hardware or firewall rules.
• • Deliver custom workshops and live coding sessions for CTOs, DevOps leads, and security teams. You will spin up ephemeral networks on the fly, integrate with identity providers like Okta and Azure AD, and showcase advanced features such as subnet routers, exit nodes, and device posture checks.
• • Become the voice of the customer inside Tailscale. You will funnel field insights to Product and Engineering, influencing roadmap priorities and ensuring our roadmap stays laser-focused on real-world pain points like SOC 2 automation, Kubernetes sidecars, and least-privilege SSH.
• • Build repeatable enablement assets—demo scripts, Terraform modules, GitHub Actions blueprints, and security whitepapers—that scale your expertise across the broader Commercial team and help newer reps ramp in days, not months.
• • Travel up to 25 % across the western region (SF Bay Area, Seattle, Denver, LA, Austin) for onsite customer workshops, conferences such as AWS re:Invent and KubeCon, and quarterly team summits. We default to remote excellence, but nothing beats whiteboarding sessions in person when the deal demands it.
• • Track everything in Salesforce and our internal tooling; forecast technical win likelihood, log feature gaps, and measure pilot success metrics like connection latency reduction, admin time saved, and ticket deflection.
• • Champion Tailscale’s open-source ethos by contributing to our docs, submitting pull requests to improve example code, and speaking at meetups. Your public artifacts will inspire the next wave of developers to adopt secure-by-default networking.
• • Thrive in a fast-moving, low-ego environment where weekly releases are the norm, Slack threads move at light speed, and every teammate—from CEO to newest intern—ships code and answers support tickets.