Systems and Security Engineer

**About the Role** Reaves Labs and Learning is building the operational nervous system of a high\-growth AI\-native educational technology company — a single, unified company brain that connects product development, customer signal, and business intelligence across flagship applications and upcoming products. This is not a traditional DevOps or security role. You are enhancing and maintaining the knowledge base, rules engine, and reasoning infrastructure of the company: the systems through which knowledge flows, decisions are made, and trust is cryptographically verified. You will work at the intersection of distributed systems, cryptographic audit trails, mechanistic AI interpretability, and organizational security — and you will own it end to end. *If you have ever wanted to build something the industry said wasn’t possible, and be the single person accountable for making it endure — this is that role.* **The Core Mandate: Continuity \& Preservation** At the heart of this role is one non\-negotiable charter: guarantee the continuity and preservation of every systems and security endpoint across all ReavesLabs products, architecture, and infrastructure. Nothing degrades silently. Nothing goes dark unnoticed. No endpoint — API, MCP server, vector index, model node, audit log, or ingestion pipeline — ever loses integrity without immediate detection, containment, and restoration. You are the steward of state, and the reason the company can trust its own memory. **What You’ll Own** * **The unified company brain —** integrating eighteen product domains, 100\+ applications, and every operational surface (GitHub, Google Drive, desktop, social, customer platforms) into one coherent, auditable knowledge graph. * **Real\-time reasoning monitors —** detecting misaligned or deceptive model reasoning before any output is broadcast, using mechanistic interpretability to catch intent, not just words. * **Cryptographic hash\-chain audit trails —** immutable, provable provenance for every reasoning event and user action across five role\-based permission tiers. * **Role\-based access control —** dynamic permission gating from Founder to Steward to Engineer to Sales to Investor, scoped by cognitive level and data sensitivity. * **Hardened local AI infrastructure —** quantized local models (Ollama), vector databases, and embedding pipelines on Mac\-based edge nodes — no cloud dependency, no latency, full control. * **Surface ingestion —** real\-time pipelines that pull product information and customer signal from disparate sources, normalize them, and embed them into the brain. **Continuity \& Preservation Responsibilities** * Maintain an authoritative registry of every systems and security endpoint across all products and domains — what exists, where it lives, what depends on it, and what breaks if it fails. * Design redundancy and failover for the always\-on anchor node and control surfaces so the brain has no single point of failure — with tested, verified restore paths, not theoretical ones. * Run continuous integrity verification on the hash\-chain audit trail; detect tampering, gaps, or breaks the moment they occur and reconstruct provenance from any point in history. * Preserve doctrine and knowledge\-base state through versioning and immutable snapshots — no doctrine ever lost, overwritten, or corrupted without a recoverable prior version. * Own disaster recovery and business continuity with defined, documented, and proven RTO/RPO targets. * Enforce credential lifecycle, key rotation, and instant access\-revocation continuity, with a verifiable record every time. **Engineering Credentials We Need to See** We hold this role to an elite technical bar. You do not need every item below, but you must be exceptional across most of them. **Core Engineering** * 5\+ years building distributed systems, cloud/edge infrastructure, or security\-hardened networks at production scale. * Strong systems\-level programming: Python and one of Go, Rust, or C/C\+\+. Comfortable in the terminal, in Git, and in CI/CD. * Deep Linux/Unix and macOS internals; networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, VPN, firewalls, split\-SSID/edge networking). **Security** * Applied cryptography: hashing, digital signatures, hash chains / Merkle structures, key management, and secure credential lifecycle. * Threat modeling, zero\-trust architecture, RBAC design, endpoint hardening, and incident response. * Relevant certifications a plus (e.g., OSCP, CISSP, Security\+); active or eligible security clearance is a strong plus. **AI / Data** * Hands\-on with LLMs, prompt engineering, RAG, vector databases (FAISS, Chroma, pgvector), and embedding pipelines. * Local model deployment and optimization: Ollama, llama.cpp, or vLLM, including quantization (Q4/Q8\) and multi\-model routing. * Bonus: exposure to mechanistic interpretability, model monitoring, or AI safety/alignment work. **How You Think** * First\-principles reasoning. You think in graphs and feedback loops, not checklists. * You design systems that are simultaneously secure, auditable, and transparent — because you know security through obscurity is a liability. **Past Projects We Want to See** Show us your work. In your application, walk us through 2–3 projects that map to what this role demands. Strong examples include: * **Resilience:** a distributed or always\-on system you architected for high availability — tell us the failure you designed against and how it held up. * **Verifiable systems:** an audit trail, provenance system, ledger, or tamper\-evident log you built — how did you prove integrity? * **AI infrastructure:** a RAG system, vector search, knowledge graph, or self\-hosted model deployment you shipped — what did you optimize for? * **Security:** an access\-control model, key\-rotation system, or incident you contained — what was the blast radius, and how did you shrink it? * **First\-principles build:** something you built that others said couldn’t be done, or a system you took from zero to production largely on your own. *Links to GitHub, live systems, architecture diagrams, or write\-ups carry more weight than a polished résumé. We want to see how you think.* **Preferred Qualifications** * Experience in defense contracting, fintech, healthcare, or another highly regulated industry — you understand what auditability actually means. * Knowledge\-graph design, ontology engineering, or semantic systems. * Experience mentoring engineers and scaling teams through complex architectural decisions. * Experience with traveling on the road setting up each location pitch or presentation and ensuring the system remains resilient and functionally operable at all times. * Able to pass a background check with no criminal history. **What Success Looks Like** * **Year One —** The unified company brain is live across all four flagship products, with flawless audit trails and zero security incidents. Anyone can query it and see exactly why it reasoned the way it did. * **Year Two —** The system is self\-improving: doctrines refine from usage, intent monitoring corrects reasoning drift, and the org scales from 20 to 200 people without losing coherence. * **Year Three —** Your infrastructure is a defensible moat — transparency, auditability, and reasoning clarity competitors cannot replicate, and an advantage in fundraising and customer trust. **Compensation \& Culture** Competitive salary commensurate with experience and impact. This is a high\-autonomy role reporting directly to the Founder \& CEO — you own the entire systems and security strategy, not just its execution. We are building an organization where decision\-making is transparent, reasoning is auditable, and trust is cryptographically verified. You will not just be an engineer here. You will be an architect of organizational trust. **How to Apply** Send your resumé plus 2–3 project write\-ups (links preferred). Tell us, in a few sentences, about a system you were personally accountable for keeping alive — and what it taught you. Pay: $165,000\.00 \- $220,000\.00 per year Benefits: * Relocation assistance Work Location: On the road