One office
He held one office of state in his life: the state's officer for crime and punishments in Lu, below the handful of men who actually ran the country, above everybody else. When it began and when it ended was never written down.
The career everybody knows, one post after another up to acting chancellor, with crime vanishing from the state inside three months, is Sima Qian's, four centuries later. The chronicle has one title and no promotions.
What the chronicle does give him
Two orders under arms. In 500 BC he went to a border meeting with the ruler of Qi as ritual assistant, the man who makes sure the ceremony is done correctly. The Qi side planned to seize his duke. He withdrew with the duke and called on the soldiers, then argued the Qi side out of it.
In 498 BC, when rebels from the fortress town of Bi broke into the capital and got as far as the duke, the chronicle records him ordering two officers down to attack them. They did, and the attack broke. Later, in exile, he told the duke of Wei that he had never learned the ordering of troops.
Why he left
Two reasons come down, both small. The men of Qi sent a gift of music girls, the head of the Ji family accepted them, and for three days no court was held. Or: after a sacrifice the roast meat was handed round to the officers, and his portion did not arrive. He left without waiting to take off his ceremonial cap.
The meat did not cost him the job. It told him he had already lost it.
The execution he probably did not order
A famous story has him putting a man called Shaozheng Mao to death while in office. It is not in the chronicle, the Analects or the Mencius; it turns up in a late chapter of the Xunzi and in Sima Qian. Zhu Xi rejected it as a fabrication, and a line of scholars after him agreed. The book does not print it.