Meet the Team

We are a global and remote organization of more than 40 team members who believe that privacy matters in technology. Meet some of our team members below.

Aaron Hmel

Marketing / Communications Specialist

Aaron joined Least Authority in 2021. He brings over 20 years professional experience in commercial business, including sales, marketing, and event management to the team. He spends his free time at hockey rinks, soccer fields, and motorsports tracks.

Amber O'Hearn

Board Member / Least Authority Enterprises Manager

Amber has an eclectic background with publications in several fields, including theoretical mathematics, cognitive psychology, computational linguistics, and more recently, nutrition and biology. She is an advocate of privacy-preserving and censorship-resistant technologies.

Anna Kaplan

Security Researcher / Engineer and Trainer

She / Her

Anna is a mathematician and cryptographer, with experience working at Zcash Foundation and IBM Research. Besides being interested in new cryptographic advancements, she is also very passionate about communicating all things cryptography and privacy

Arsenii Efremenko

Junior Operations Coordinator

Arsenii is an energetic zoomer on a mission to bring fun into our harsh and scary world.

Benoit Donneaux

Site Reliability Engineer

Toying with computers before the rise of internet, Ben has started as a software developer and subsequently became a network and system engineer. Fond of Free and Open-Source Software and the DevOps methodology, Ben strongly believes our privacy online is best supported by those two principles.

Burak Atasoy

Project Manager Security Consulting

Burak began his work in traditional finance as a trader and has since worked as a market analyst and risk management consultant at Fintech, where he consulted different institutional clients on various projects. He is particularly interested in decentralized systems and their potential to address many problems that mainly result from the current global financial system.

Chris Wood

Product Designer and Lead UI/UX Developer

Chris is a former academic philosopher with research and teaching interests relating to privacy, censorship, and the ethics of design. A long-time Free Software advocate and hobbyist hacker, Chris is passionate about tools and technologies that empower ordinary people. He is the lead developer of Gridsync, a cross-platform Tahoe-LAFS-based desktop application that aims to make secure and distributed storage easy and accessible for everyone.

Dr. Dorothee Landgraf, LL.M

General Counsel Least Authority Group

Adjunct Professor of Law, Duquesne University School of Law, Pittsburgh, PA (USA)

Doctor Juris (PhD), University of Cologne, Germany

Master of Laws (LL.M.) for Foreign Lawyers, Duquesne University School of Law, Pittsburgh, PA (USA)

Florian Sesser

Product Manager / Engineer

Florian celebrates the beauty of elegant solutions that sometimes can be found in cybernetics. Making computers work for the people makes him smile.

Jan Winkelmann

Lead Senior Security Researcher / Engineer

Jan’s interests lie in distributed systems and cryptography. As a software developer, he has worked on IPFS and currently works on Secure Scuttlebutt. As a student, he designed and analyzed key exchange protocols.

Jasper Hepp

Security Researcher / Engineer

Jasper has a background in mathematics and computational economics. He is excited about cryptography.

Jawid Jamiulahmadi

Security Researcher / Engineer

Jawid has more than 8 years of experience working as a programmer and software engineer. He has been involved in the Ethereum eco-system since 2016 and is passionate about how blockchain can change the future of financial and decentralized systems.

Jean-Paul Calderone

Engineering / Product Development

He / Him

Jean-Paul has been programming for over twenty years and programming in Python for over fifteen. He is best known as a core developer on the Twisted project.

Jehad Baeth

Security Researcher / Engineer

Jehad is a software engineer, an internet freedom enthusiast and an aspiring academic with a focus on information quality and data privacy and security. He has worked in a variety of companies adopting different Tech Stacks.

Jessy Bissal

Technical Editor

Jessy has over a decade of experience editing professional and academic documents in the Information Technology, Electronics, Healthcare, Education, Financials, and Communication Services Sectors. Before joining Least Authority, she taught Rhetoric and Composition at the university level and worked as a B2B/B2C copywriter/texter.

Lauri Hmel

COO for PrivateStorage

Lauri has a background in accounting and finance, and more than 20 years of experience in business. She works on finance, reporting, and business operations and development for Least Authority.

Laurie Drinkhall

Client Account Manager

She / Her

Laurie is a highly experienced Client Account Manager (20+ years of experience) with a passion for building and maintaining client relationships by putting the client FIRST and ensuring customer satisfaction. In addition, she has a heavy operational background with skills in contract negotiations, forecasting/budgeting, marketing and product development.

Liz Steininger

CEO / Managing Director

Before taking over as CEO, Liz spent over 15 years supporting the advancement of digital rights, access to information, freedom of expression and open source software as a Program and Project Manager, Strategist and Analyst.

Meejah

Engineering / Product Development

Author of txtorcon, core developer of Crossbar.io/Autobahn, and contributor to other open source projects such as Twisted and Tor. Meejah has 20 years of development experience in many fields.

Mirco Richter

Lead Software Security Analyst

Mirco is a mathematician and computer scientist living in Berlin. He has been working and conducting research in the Blockchain space since 2011 and mostly focuses on Cryptography and Consensus Algorithms.

Nicole Ernst

Security Researcher / Engineer

Nicole worked in the world of FinTech as a Software Developer prior to developing a fascination for decentralized finance and all things crypto. She is interested in the technical side of cryptocurrencies and blockchains as well as their societal and economic implications.

Shae Erisson

Senior Software Developer

Shae has lived in 3 countries, 25 US states, speaks 2.5 languages, rides on one wheel, and got Swedish immigration law changed twice while living by the Arctic Circle.

Steven Jung

Security Researcher / Engineer

Steven is a software engineer with enthusiasm for blockchain and security. He is becoming a perfectionist and likes to spot flaws not just in code, but anywhere else. Based on years of development and audit experience, he hopes that no errors will get out of sight.

Sven M. Hallberg

Security Researcher / Engineer

Applied scientist of insecurity and freelance programmer. Cryptologist by night.

Tiffany Ou

Designer

Tiffany has worked as a graphic designer for 15 years, specializing in information architecture, brand identities, and multi-platform design and production. She has extensive experience working within start-ups as well as global corporate environments — covering a wide range of clientele industries, including technology, finance, hospitality, entertainment, and creative services.

Zooko Wilcox

Founder / Board Member

Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn has more than 20 years of experience in secure distributed systems, free and open source software, and startups. Currently, Zooko is the Founder and CEO of the Electric Coin Company, the creators of Zcash.