Chief Software Engineer

About Lieef Lieef Investment Management is an investment and technology firm based in Irvine, California. We build software alongside our investment work, and we hold that software to the same standard as a financial statement: it has to be proven, not assumed. The role As Chief Software Engineer, you will own the technical integrity of the systems Lieef builds. You'll set the engineering standard, decide what "proven" means for each system, and do the hands-on work of proving it. That includes testing whether a system does exactly what it claims under normal use, under failure, and under attack, and reporting the results in a form an investor, a counterparty, or an auditor could rely on. You'll often work from a specification rather than from source code. You'll design the tests, run them, and stand behind the numbers. This is a senior, hands-on role at a small firm. You'll work directly with the founder, and your judgment will shape how Lieef's technology is built, verified, and presented to the outside world. What you'll do Own the engineering standard for every system Lieef builds, from specification through verification.Turn specifications into independent reference implementations and test suites.Verify cryptographic integrity by checking signatures, hash chains, and ledger agreement, and confirm that tampering is caught.Inject real-world failure (crashes, torn writes, full disks, clock drift, network loss and reordering) and prove systems recover without error.Test correctness under retry, concurrency, timeout, and replay.Think like an adversary, and measure how much a dishonest party could get away with.Test whether systems leak information through traffic or timing, and report what an observer could learn.Benchmark latency, throughput, CPU, disk, and memory with methods others can reproduce.Prove your own tests work by running them against deliberately broken systems.Keep an evidence trail that is complete, unedited, and independently timestamped.Run cloud infrastructure with strict controls on cost, time, and configuration.Write clear reports that state exactly what was tested, what passed, what failed, and how confident we can be.Qualifications 5+ years in software, test, or reliability engineering, with a record of shipping test systems others depend on.Strong programming ability in at least one systems or scripting language, enough to implement a spec from scratch.Working knowledge of applied cryptography, including SHA-256, Ed25519, canonical serialization, and hash chains, used correctly rather than invented.Deep Linux experience with fault-injection and observation tools such as strace, netem, and disk and clock manipulation.Experience testing distributed systems for idempotency and consistency.The ability to reason about protocols and incentives, and to find where a dishonest party could gain an edge.Comfort with statistics for reporting, including confidence intervals on small samples.Disciplined benchmarking habits: fixed seeds, warm-up exclusion, latency percentiles, and resource tracking over long runs.Hands-on cloud operations with strict cost and time controls.Clear, plain writing for technical and non-technical readers.Familiarity with side-channel and timing analysis is a strong plus.How we work We confirm; we don't guess.Raw results are kept exactly as generated.Failures are reported the moment they happen, not explained away later.Every claim we make about our technology has evidence behind it.The person we want Someone who reports a failure the moment it happens, keeps every raw result, and would rather be right than agreeable. You are careful by nature, skeptical by training, and comfortable owning the final word on whether something works.