Senior Performance Marketing Manager

Position Overview

Tailscale is seeking a Senior Performance Marketing Manager to own and scale our paid marketing channels. This role is responsible for managing and optimizing Tailscale’s investment across digital and physical channels, including SEM, paid social, out-of-home (OOH), sponsorships, and other experimental formats. This is a high-impact, high-visibility position central to our go-to-market strategy, directly contributing to both self-serve and sales revenue goals.

This is an individual contributor role today, with the expectation that the candidate will grow into a team lead as the company scales, given their curiosity, analytical sharpness, and leadership potential.

The ideal candidate possesses deep curiosity about our target audiences, extensive knowledge of advertising technology, a proven track record of high ROI impact from advertising, and a passion for experimentation to continuously improve our performance marketing program.

Responsibilities

• End-to-End Program Ownership: Own and operate the paid marketing program from strategy development, execution, measurement, and optimization.
• Channel Management: Manage spend and campaigns across various platforms including Google Ads, Bing, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, newsletters, podcasts, billboards, and other growth channels.
• Experimentation Roadmap: Develop and execute an experimentation roadmap for both performance and brand campaigns to drive traffic, organization activations, subscriptions, and sales pipeline.
• Key Metric Tracking: Define and track key performance metrics such as CAC, payback, activation rate, ROAS, and LTV:CAC in collaboration with growth, sales, data, and finance teams.
• Creative Development: Write creative briefs and partner with brand and content teams to develop compelling ad creative.
• Performance Analysis: Analyze campaign performance, sharing insights and recommendations across the team.
• Campaign Support: Support major campaign initiatives, including product launches, competitor takeouts, and account-based marketing (ABM) efforts.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with product marketing, lifecycle, comms, SEO, and web teams to ensure performance programs align with and amplify the broader Go-To-Market strategy.
• Industry Awareness: Stay current on ad platform changes, best practices, and SaaS benchmarks.

What We’re Looking For

• Experience: 4-7+ years of experience in B2B performance marketing, preferably within a high-growth SaaS company.
• Channel Expertise: Demonstrated ability to scale and optimize paid programs across multiple channels (SEM, display, video, social, OOH, etc.).
• Analytical Skills: Strong analytical mindset with proficiency in tools such as Looker, Google Analytics, and Excel/Sheets.
• Communication & Strategy: A clear communicator and strategic thinker capable of simplifying complex problems and driving cross-functional alignment.
• Program Management: A systems-thinking approach to program management, with an ability to create templates and repeatable playbooks.
• Outcome Orientation: A strong focus on outcomes and a drive to build an industry-leading performance marketing program.
• Curiosity: Relentless curiosity about our target audiences, Tailscale users, and the company itself.
• Adaptability: Comfort with ambiguity and a willingness to experiment and iterate quickly.

Nice to Have

• You are a current user of Tailscale.
• Experience in developer tools, infrastructure, networking, or security startups.
• A desire to eventually move into people management.

Company Information

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.

Compensation and Benefits Tailscale strives to maintain fair and equitable compensation practices across all roles and levels. Our compensation package includes base salary, equity, and comprehensive benefits. The salary range displayed on job postings represents the target range for a new hire's base salary. Individual offers may vary based on experience and skill set.

Application Instructions

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