Senior Software Engineer

Job description

Valarian Technologies is a dual-use technology company building critical tools to safeguard the future in an era of evolving global security challenges. We're rethinking security beyond traditional military domains, addressing asymmetric threats that impact our technological advantage, economic strength, and democratic institutions. We build Acra – the platform foundation for everything we do as a dual-use technology company. The platform’s name, rooted in the Greek word for citadel (or, fortress), reflects the design and purpose of our infrastructure-agnostic secure enclaves: protecting critical data. Some of the government and commercial workflows include: increased operational resiliency for mission-critical systems and functions; enabling organisations to more quickly and widely adopt emerging technologies while ensuring the integrity of their intellectual property; information flow during disaster response scenarios, and zero-trust / least-privilege environments for M&A, attorney-client privileged communications, etc. And we’ve only scratched the surface. At our core, we're driven by a shared mission and a belief in making a tangible impact on our world. Whether you join our London HQ or the wider global organisation, you’ll be a part of collaborative, high-performing teams, creating cutting-edge software, platforms, and infrastructure. The Role You will design, build, and operate backend and platform services for **ACRA**, a complex security-focused Kubernetes platform that needs to be reliable, observable, scalable, and secure from the start. You will work primarily in **Go**, building microservices, APIs, internal platform services, and event-driven systems. You will own services end to end: from system design and implementation through to containerisation, deployment, monitoring, debugging, and production operations. You will help shape the infrastructure and delivery foundations around the platform, including **Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows, container registries, secrets management, deployment automation, and Argo-based delivery flows**. You will contribute to core platform primitives such as identity-aware service communication, lifecycle orchestration, policy-driven deployment, auditability, observability, and controlled application execution. ACRA’s architecture separates the control plane, platform enforcement layer, and isolated execution environments, so this role requires someone who can reason clearly about trust boundaries, failure domains, and operational responsibility. This is not a role for someone who only wants to take tickets. We are looking for someone who understands the product vision, challenges assumptions, proposes better designs, and helps translate ambiguous requirements into robust technical systems. As ACRA grows, this role offers a clear path to increasing technical ownership and influence. You will not just build services and move on; you will help maintain, evolve, and scale the systems you own over time. You will also help raise the bar for how we design, review, deploy, operate, and learn as an engineering team. You do **not** need to have worked with every tool in our stack before. We are looking for strong engineering judgement, curiosity, ownership, and the ability to build reliable systems in complex environments. What you’ll do: - Build and own backend services, APIs, microservices, and platform components in **Go**. - Own services from system design through implementation, deployment, observability, and production operations. - Design event-driven, scalable, observable, and resilient systems. - Build and improve **Docker images, Kubernetes workloads, CI/CD pipelines, and Argo/GitOps workflows**. - Work with container registries, secrets, secure configuration, and deployment automation. - Contribute to platform architecture, system design, security boundaries, and operational models. - Help build platform capabilities such as workload isolation, policy enforcement, auditability, and identity-aware communication. - Work closely with product, leadership, and engineering to turn ambiguous requirements into reliable technical solutions. - Make pragmatic technical trade-offs and explain them clearly. - Improve monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, and production debugging. - Raise engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, and operational improvements. - Operate independently in a startup environment with strong ownership and product thinking. What we are looking for: - Senior backend engineering experience, ideally with hands-on **Go** experience. - Experience owning production services, not just building features. - Experience building APIs, backend services, microservices, or distributed systems. - Strong experience with **Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD**. - Familiarity with **GitOps, Argo, container registries, secrets, and secure deployment workflows**. - Strong system design fundamentals, especially around reliability, scalability, observability, and failure handling. - Ability to reason about security boundaries, operational risk, and production failure modes. - Experience debugging issues across applications, services, and infrastructure. - Comfort working from ambiguous requirements and shaping the technical approach. - Product-minded engineering judgement: you care about why the platform is being built, not just what needs to be implemented. - A self-driven, ownership-oriented way of working. - Comfortable giving and receiving feedback, reviewing designs, and helping improve team standards. - Willingness to work across backend, platform, infrastructure, and DevOps areas. The most important thing is not that you have done everything on this list before. It is that you bring strong engineering judgement, ownership, curiosity, and the determination to build excellent systems. Nice to have - Secure or regulated environments, such as defence, government, fintech, healthcare, critical infrastructure, or sovereign cloud. - Zero-trust architecture, identity-aware systems, policy enforcement, or workload isolation. - Service mesh, network policy, ingress/egress control, or secure service-to-service communication. - Observability tooling, including metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and incident response. - Supply-chain security concepts such as image signing, vulnerability scanning, SBOMs, artifact verification, or admission control. - Secrets management tools such as Vault, SOPS, Sealed Secrets, External Secrets, or cloud-native secret managers. - Systems where auditability, traceability, and operational evidence are first-class requirements. - Startup, platform, infrastructure, or product engineering environments with broad ownership. Again: these are not requirements. They are areas you may get to work with and go deeper into here. Benefits: Our benefits are designed to ensure our employees feel taken care of and are proud to be a part of the Valarian team. We are committed to consistently enhancing our benefit package, taking into account the overall well-being and needs of our teammates. Here are the key benefits accessible to all employees at Valarian Technologies: - Equity – because you have the right to own what you’re building - A competitive salary – because we value your unique skills - Employer pension contributions – because you deserve a secure future - Private health insurance - because your health is important to us - Hybrid work setup – because everyone has different needs - Rewarding company retreats and meetups that respect your work/life balance – because we love getting to know each other! ## Life at Valarian Our culture is built on inclusivity, compassion and flexibility – we want everyone to be empowered to achieve their goals at Valarian. The work we do is vital, but so are the connections that make it happen. We thrive on the shared energy, spontaneous conversations, and mutual trust built when we spend time together. We operate on a hybrid model, gathering in our London office 3 days a week to support one another and collaborate. *We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.*