Director of Data

Position Overview

• Location Type: Not specified
• Job Type: Not specified
• Salary: Not specified

Tailscale is seeking a Director of Data to establish and lead its data engineering, analytics engineering, data analysis, and data science functions. This role requires a leader with strong data engineering and analytics engineering experience, coupled with solid business acumen, to design and build the data infrastructure essential for data-driven decision-making across all departments. Reporting to the SVP of Operations, this is a hands-on leadership position ideal for someone who enjoys building and prototyping, can architect systems, write code, and mentor a team.

As Tailscale scales, this role will be instrumental in consolidating data, building reliable pipelines, creating robust reporting and monitoring, implementing modern data engineering best practices, and establishing data governance frameworks. The ideal candidate will be experienced with a modern data stack and adept at navigating the challenges of scaling data in a fast-growing tech company, with a forward-thinking approach to incorporating AI and empowering end-users.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, develop, and grow a team spanning data engineering, analytics engineering, data analysts, and data scientists.
• Define and execute the strategic roadmap for data infrastructure and analytics capabilities across the organization.
• Oversee the design and implementation of scalable data pipelines, data models, analytics solutions, and business intelligence tooling.
• Establish data governance frameworks, quality standards, and unified data models across operational and product use cases.
• Partner cross-functionally with Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Finance, and Product teams to understand and address data needs, including reporting.
• Expose Tailscale’s data to departments via a self-service solution for high-impact decision-making.
• Optimize data flows and quality across key business systems (e.g., Salesforce, Stripe, Jira) and downstream analytics platforms (e.g., Looker, Grafana, Hightouch).
• Identify opportunities to leverage modern AI/ML technologies to enhance product and business intelligence, internal tooling, and customer experience.

What We Are Looking For

• Experience scaling data infrastructure and teams in a fast-growing startup environment, with a track record of building and leading technical talent.
• Deep understanding of modern data architectures, data modeling, and pipeline design, with strong technical judgment for system optimization.
• High curiosity, growth mindset, and experimentation orientation around AI and its intersection with data infrastructure.
• Proven ability to create and execute long-term data strategy while delivering immediate business impact. This includes thinking big, starting small, shipping fast, testing new approaches, and standardizing successful ones. Experience building scalable systems is essential.
• Hands-on experience with modern data stack technologies.

About Tailscale

Tailscale is building the new Internet by delivering software that makes it easy to securely interconnect people and their devices, no matter where they are. From hobbyists to multinational corporations, teams of every size use Tailscale each day to protect their networks, share access to internal tools, and more. We're building a future for the Internet that's easy, sensible, and safe, like it used to be. Founded in 2019 and fully distributed, we're backed by Accel, CRV, Insight, Heavybit, and Uncork Capital.