The best way to do that is using an OAuth client. These don't expire, and grant scoped access to the Tailscale API. You use this to generate access keys for the devices that need to authenticate to the network.

We use this for debugging access to CI builds, among other things – when a particular build parameter is set, then the CI build will use an OAuth key to request an ephemeral, single-use access key from the Tailscale API, then use that to create a node that engineers can SSH into.

Access keys ideally should be short-lived and single-use where possible. https://tailscale.com/kb/1215/oauth-clients#generating-long-... has details on this flow.