Software Engineer 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.

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 help design, build, and operate backend services for a complex platform that needs to be secure, reliable, observable, and scalable from the start. You will work primarily in Go, building microservices, APIs, internal platform services, and event-driven systems. You will contribute across the full service lifecycle, from implementation and testing through to containerisation, deployment, monitoring, debugging, and production support. You will work with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows, container registries, secrets management, deployment automation, and Argo-based delivery flows. You will contribute to platform capabilities such as identity-aware service communication, lifecycle orchestration, policy-driven deployment, auditability, observability, and controlled application execution.

What you’ll do:

• Build backend services, APIs, and microservices in Go.
• Contribute to the design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operation of backend services.
• Build and maintain Docker images, Kubernetes workloads, CI/CD pipelines, and Argo/GitOps workflows.
• Work with container registries, secrets, secure configuration, and deployment automation.
• Help design event-driven, scalable, observable, and resilient systems.
• Contribute to platform architecture, system design discussions, and security boundaries.
• Support identity-aware service communication, lifecycle orchestration, auditability, and controlled application execution.
• Help improve monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, and production debugging.
• Work closely with product and the engineering team to turn requirements into reliable technical solutions.
• Take ownership of well-defined projects and contribute independently within a collaborative engineering team.
• Operate comfortably in a startup environment where engineers work across backend, platform, and DevOps responsibilities.

What we are looking for:

• Solid backend engineering experience, ideally with hands-on Go experience.
• Experience building APIs, backend services, or microservices.
• Comfortable working with Docker and containerised applications.
• Some experience with Kubernetes, or a strong interest in working deeply with Kubernetes-based systems.
• Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and modern deployment workflows.
• Familiarity with GitOps, Argo, container registries, secrets, or secure deployments.
• Understanding of event-driven architecture, asynchronous workflows, or distributed systems.
• Good system design fundamentals, especially around reliability, scalability, observability, and failure handling.
• Comfortable debugging issues across applications, services, and infrastructure.
• Product-minded and interested in understanding why the platform is being built, not just what needs to be implemented.
• Self-driven, curious, and able to take ownership of defined areas of work.
• Comfortable working in a startup environment with changing priorities and broad technical exposure.
• Willing to learn across backend, platform, infrastructure, and DevOps areas.

Nice to have:

• Experience with secure or regulated environments, such as defence, government, fintech, healthcare, critical infrastructure, or sovereign cloud.
• Experience working in startups, platform teams, infrastructure teams, or product teams with broad engineering ownership.
• Understanding of zero-trust architecture, identity-aware systems, policy enforcement, or workload isolation.
• Experience with service mesh, network policy, ingress/egress control, or secure service-to-service communication.
• Experience with observability tooling, including metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and incident response.
• Familiarity with supply-chain security concepts such as image signing, vulnerability scanning, SBOMs, artifact verification, or admission control.
• Familiarity with secrets management tools such as Vault, SOPS, Sealed Secrets, External Secrets, or cloud-native secret managers.
• Experience contributing to systems where auditability, traceability, and operational evidence are important.

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
• 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.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. 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.