Software Engineer - Distributed Systems Control Plane — Cofounder
Equity Only (Pre-funding, No Initial Salary)
Role: Part-time
We’re building a patent-pending pre-execution governance layer for regulated and distributed systems.
This role is equity-based. We are pre-revenue and entering our first pre-seed raise. We’re looking for a Control Plane / Distributed Systems Engineer to join as a cofounder and take full ownership of the product core.
This is not a feature role.
This is not a UI role.
This is not a “move fast and patch later” system.
If this hire is wrong, everything downstream breaks.
What You Own
You are the final technical authority on the execution layer.
You will:
* Design and own the execution governance architecture
* Define control-plane vs data-plane separation
* Establish hard invariants the system will never violate
* Decide what executes, what is rejected, and why
* Kill feature creep early — publicly and calmly
* Set the rules every other engineer must build under
This role has veto power.
What You’ll Build
* Pre-execution validation and gating services
* Deterministic execution flows (no “best-effort” logic)
* Policy enforcement before runtime
* Service-to-service trust boundaries
* Audit-safe, replayable decision paths
* Infrastructure-agnostic control logic
If you’ve designed systems where failure modes matter, you’ll feel at home.
What You Must Be Strong In
We’re looking for depth, not keywords.
You should have real experience with several of the following:
* Distributed systems and backend architecture
* Control planes, schedulers, or orchestration layers
* Strongly opinionated API and service design
* Stateless vs stateful execution trade-offs
* Failure-first design (timeouts, retries, idempotency)
* Languages such as Go, Rust, Java, or equivalent
* Message-driven or request-driven systems (gRPC, queues, streams)
You’ve shipped systems where correctness beat speed.
What You Must Be Comfortable Saying
* “No — that violates the execution model.”
* “This doesn’t belong in the control layer.”
* “That feature creates an implicit policy leak.”
* “We don’t support that — by design.”
Calm authority beats enthusiasm.
What This Is Not
* Not a mobile role
* Not a frontend role
* Not a blockchain-hype role
* Not a DevOps-only role
* Not a consensus-protocol research post
You won’t be polishing UIs or chasing frameworks.
Why This Role Exists First
Without this hire, you get:
* Architecture drift
* Inconsistent execution semantics
* Governance bolted on after the fact
* Investor skepticism
* Fragile systems that work… until they don’t
This role prevents all of that.
Who You’ll Work With
* Founder (product & governance)
* Senior backend engineers
* UI and integration engineers downstream
You define the ground they build on.
Location & Structure
* Remote-first
* Cofounder-level ownership
* Equity meaningful enough to care
* Long-term commitment, not contract churn
How to Apply
If you’ve built systems that other systems must obey, we want to hear from you.
Apply via LinkedIn or send your CV to ihanif@likkletek.com.
If you’re looking to experiment, iterate casually, or “see how it goes” — this won’t be a fit.