Remote Release Manager: Orchestrate Fast, Safe Shipments

Tailscale; United States; Remote; USD 181,000 - 226,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote first environment

Equity and base salary package

Retirement contributions

Paid time off

Job summary

Tailscale is seeking a Release Manager who will own how we ship product, coordinating release cadence, roles, tooling, and norms across engineering and product. You will design processes that engineers trust and rely on, starting from the ground up and expanding to operational metrics as the team grows.

You will work with engineering leads, product managers, TPMs, and support to ensure releases stay on track, while optimizing for speed, reliability, and low friction across the organization.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in engineering operations, release management, or a closely related role at a software company
• Direct experience building or significantly improving release management processes
• Technical fluency: you understand software development deeply enough to have credible conversations with engineers about build systems, deployment pipelines, branching strategies, and production operations
• Strong instincts for what process is worth having and what’s just overhead, and optimizing process for trust and adoption
• Comfort with ambiguity and the ability to build structure from scratch

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and continuously improve Tailscale’s release management process: including release cadence, readiness criteria, rollout coordination, and go/no-go decisions
• Build and maintain the tooling, templates, runbooks, and documentation that make release processes repeatable and low-friction
• Partner with engineering leads and product managers to surface risk early and drive resolution before it becomes a crisis
• Define and track operational metrics that reflect the health of our release practices (e.g., release frequency, change failure rate)
• Keep releases on schedule by facilitating cross-team planning rituals that keep engineering and product coordinated
• Identify and drive systemic improvements to how we operate, using data and judgment to prioritize what actually matters

Skills

Engineering operations

Release management

Technical fluency

Process optimization

Ambiguity tolerance

Cross-team collaboration

Tools

Build systems

Deployment pipelines

Feature flags

Canary deployments

Rollouts

Job description

Tailscale is seeking a Release Manager who will own how we ship product, coordinating release cadence, roles, tooling, and norms across engineering and product. You will design processes that engineers trust and rely on, starting from the ground up and expanding to operational metrics as the team grows.

You will work with engineering leads, product managers, TPMs, and support to ensure releases stay on track, while optimizing for speed, reliability, and low friction across the organization.