Platform Engineer

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.

What you’ll do:

• Build and improve the internal platform capabilities used by both engineering teams and customers across ACRA.

• Design and implement tooling, automation, workflows, and integrations that improve developer velocity and operational consistency.

• Work closely with backend engineers to make services easier to build, test, deploy, observe, secure, and operate.

• Build platform primitives for application lifecycle management, environment provisioning, deployment automation, configuration, secrets, observability, and controlled execution.

• Build and improve golden paths, reusable templates, and self-service workflows for engineering teams.

• Work with Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Argo CD, GitOps, GitHub Actions, Helm, Kustomize, container registries, secrets management, and CNCF tooling.

• Write code and automation in languages such as Go, Python, TypeScript, or JavaScript.

• Improve CI/CD pipelines, release workflows, deployment safety, rollback strategies, and environment management.

• Integrate platform tools into coherent workflows rather than disconnected infrastructure pieces.

• Evaluate, introduce, and operationalise CNCF tools where they improve the platform.

• Build systems that work across GCP, on-premise, bare-metal, sovereign cloud, air-gapped, and customer-managed environments.

• Contribute to observability, alerting, logging, tracing, dashboards, and production debugging workflows.

• Define platform standards, golden paths, reusable templates, and operational patterns.

• Work with infrastructure engineers on the boundaries between platform tooling and core infrastructure.

• Take ownership of defined projects and grow into broader technical responsibility over time.

What we are looking for: 

• Experience in platform engineering, DevOps, infrastructure engineering, backend engineering, SRE, or developer tooling.

• Strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD, and modern deployment workflows.

• Comfortable writing production-quality automation or tooling in at least one language such as Go, Python, TypeScript, or JavaScript.

• Familiarity with infrastructure as code and GitOps workflows, especially Terraform, Argo CD, Helm, Kustomize, or similar tools.

• Experience working with CI/CD systems such as GitHub Actions or similar tooling.

• Good understanding of how applications are built, containerised, deployed, configured, monitored, and operated.

• Strong system design fundamentals, especially around reliability, scalability, observability, failure handling, and maintainability.

• Product-minded approach to platform engineering. You care about why the platform is being built, not just what needs to be implemented.

• Evidence of building useful tools, automation, deployment systems, reusable templates, self-service workflows, or platform capabilities for other engineers.

• Comfortable working with backend engineers and understanding application-level requirements.

• Able to move quickly while still building systems that are understandable, maintainable, and safe.

• Self-driven, curious, and comfortable taking ownership of defined areas of work.

• Comfortable working in a startup environment with changing priorities and broad technical exposure.

• Strong communication skills. You can work across infrastructure, backend, product, and leadership without adding unnecessary process or noise.

Nice to have:

• Experience building internal developer platforms, paved roads, golden paths, or platform-as-a-product capabilities.

• Experience working in startups, product engineering teams, infrastructure teams, or platform teams with broad ownership.

• Experience with GCP, on-premise, bare-metal, air-gapped, or restricted deployment environments.

• Experience with service mesh, network policy, ingress and egress control, or secure service-to-service communication.

• Familiarity with secrets management tools such as Vault, OpenBao, SOPS, Sealed Secrets, External Secrets, or cloud-native secret managers.

• Familiarity with supply-chain security concepts such as image signing, vulnerability scanning, SBOMs, artefact verification, admission control, or policy-as-code.

• Experience with CNCF tools such as cert-manager, External Secrets, OPA, Kyverno, Gatekeeper, Crossplane, Backstage, Argo Workflows, Flux, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, OpenTelemetry, Istio, Cilium, or Envoy.

• Experience with backend engineering, APIs, microservices, event-driven systems, or Go services.

• Experience contributing to systems where auditability, traceability, and operational evidence are important.

• Experience with secure or regulated environments, such as defence, government, fintech, healthcare, critical infrastructure, sovereign cloud, or customer-managed deployments.

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 world is changing, and so is our way of working. If you want to join us in the London office – it’s quite nice! – you’re welcome to; and if you’d prefer to work remotely, that’s fine too.

And as we build elegant solutions to simplify the complexities of business collaboration, we also simplify work life: contribute wherever and whenever allows you to be your best self. We trust each other to consistently raise the bar, and we challenge each other to continually reach new heights.