DevSecOps Engineer — Data-Sovereign, High-Availability Platform in London

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 organizations 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. 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

Join us as a DevSecOps and help us build the future of data sovereignty! We're seeking a DevSecOps passionate about creating high-performance, secure, scalable, and reliable services for our production infrastructure and security. You'll have a direct impact, improving existing systems and developing innovative solutions to complex challenges. Our small, collaborative engineering teams own the full lifecycle of their services, from development to production operations. We champion automation and empower you to choose the best tools for the job. If you thrive in a fast-paced environment where you can make a real difference, we want to hear from you!

What You’ll Do

• Develop and implement a comprehensive observability strategy for self-hosted deployments, including infrastructure and tooling for monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting. This will involve designing and implementing robust metrics and logging systems.
• Engineer the Acra platform for high availability and fault tolerance. This includes ensuring resilience against Cloud Availability Zone outages and the ability to gracefully handle node failures.
• Guarantee 99.9% uptime for the platform's control plane and deployment management.
• Design and implement a disaster recovery plan with active/passive deployments and seamless failover capabilities.
• Architect and implement a highly available deployment setup for applications within the Acra platform. This will involve designing and building the infrastructure and processes necessary for continuous operation.
• Create and maintain robust backup and recovery strategies for all Valarian products, ensuring data integrity and minimal downtime in the event of a failure.
• Integrate and manage an incident detection and paging solution to ensure rapid response to critical issues and minimize service disruptions.
• Scale the Acra platform and applications to support large concurrent user bases (25+ users) and sustained daily usage. This will involve performance tuning, capacity planning, and optimization of resource utilization.
• Collaborate closely with the product engineering team to influence the design and implementation of new products and features, ensuring they meet our reliability and scalability standards from the outset.

Preferred Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s degree (or foreign equivalent) in Computer Science or a related field; relevant practical experience will also be considered.
• Languages: Proficiency with programming languages like Go, Bash, Python.
• K8s Security: Deep experience with Kubernetes security: RBAC, PodSecurityPolicies (or their replacements), Admission Controllers, and Kubernetes network policies.
• Networking: Proficiency in secure networking practices, including TLS, mutual TLS (mTLS), ingress/egress controls, and VPN tunneling configurations.
• Service Mesh: Proven experience operating and securing service mesh technologies (e.g., Istio, Linkerd, or Consul Connect).
• Vault: Hands-on experience with HashiCorp Vault in production, including dynamic secrets engines, auth backends, and policy design.
• Load Balancing: Practical knowledge of HAProxy or equivalent reverse proxies/load balancers, with experience configuring L4/L7 security protections.
• Vulnerability Mgmt: Familiarity with CVE triage workflows and integrating vulnerability scanners into CI/CD and registry workflows.
• Runtime Security: Exposure to runtime security tooling (e.g., Falco, eBPF-based monitoring) and familiarity with basic incident response workflows.
• Communication: Comfort representing engineering in external calls with auditors, pentesters, and security vendors; able to explain infrastructure decisions in security terms.
• Compliance: Familiarity with compliance standards (SOC 2, ISO 27001, etc.) and cloud security postures in AWS, Azure, or GCP.

Salary & Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity grants
• Employer pension contributions; UK roles include enhanced employer pension contributions
• US roles include 401(k) retirement savings plan – traditional and Roth
• For US roles, we offer comprehensive medical, dental and vision plans at little to no cost to you
• For UK roles, Valarian will cover the full cost of the Private Medical Insurance (PMI) premium
• Basic Life / AD&D and long-term disability insurance 100% covered by Valarian
• Hybrid work arrangements are managed at team level
• Generous holiday calendar and PTO
• Relocation assistance (depending on role eligibility)

Valarian Technologies Limited is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applications from individuals regardless of race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender, identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, veteran, amnesty, or any other legally protected characteristic. We are committed to ensuring a fair and inclusive recruitment process and providing employment opportunities to all applicants. Decision recruitment, hiring, and employment are based solely on qualifications, skills, and experience relevant to the job requirements.