Senior Infrastructure 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 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.

We’re looking for a Senior Infrastructure Engineer to own and evolve the foundational infrastructure layer behind ACRA. This is a deep infrastructure role. You will work across Kubernetes, Linux, networking, storage, service-to-service communication, observability, security boundaries, and production operations. You will be responsible for the systems that everything else depends on: clusters, networks, storage layers, ingress and egress paths, runtime infrastructure, deployment foundations, and operational reliability. This role values depth, judgement, and operational correctness over short-term churn. We are looking for someone with real production experience who can reason through complex infrastructure problems, understand failure modes, and make careful engineering decisions that improve the reliability and security of the whole platform.

You should be comfortable operating close to the metal: debugging Kubernetes, understanding networking behaviour, reasoning about distributed storage, improving observability, and helping define the infrastructure patterns that ACRA will rely on as it scales. This is not a generic DevOps support role or internal IT role. You will be a critical engineer in the team responsible for the infrastructure foundations of a high-trust platform.

What you’ll do:

• Design, build, operate, and improve Kubernetes-based infrastructure for ACRA.
• Own core infrastructure plumbing across networking, storage, workload scheduling, service communication, ingress, egress, DNS, certificates, and cluster-level security.
• Operate and debug production Kubernetes environments across GCP, on-premise, bare-metal, sovereign cloud, air-gapped, and customer-managed deployments.
• Work on multi-cluster Kubernetes environments, cluster networking, network policy, service mesh, and secure service-to-service communication.
• Help operate and evolve distributed storage systems, including storage classes, CSI drivers, capacity planning, replication, recovery, and failure handling.
• Work with infrastructure technologies such as Kubernetes, Cilium, eBPF, Istio, Rook Ceph, Terraform, Argo CD, GitOps, Helm, Kustomize, and related CNCF tooling.
• Build infrastructure automation that improves repeatability, reliability, and operational safety.
• Improve observability across infrastructure layers, including metrics, logs, traces, alerting, dashboards, and operational runbooks.
• Investigate and resolve complex production issues across networking, storage, Kubernetes, Linux, and application infrastructure.
• Contribute to incident response, root-cause analysis, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and production readiness.
• Define infrastructure standards, operational boundaries, security controls, and deployment patterns across the platform.
• Work closely with engineering teams to make services easier to deploy, operate, monitor, and debug.
• Contribute to the long-term technical direction of the DevOps department and the infrastructure foundations of ACRA.

What we are looking for:

• Strong experience in infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, SRE, or production systems engineering.
• Deep hands-on experience operating Kubernetes in production.
• Strong understanding of Linux systems, containers, networking, storage, and distributed infrastructure.
• Strong networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, routing, load balancing, ingress, egress, network policy, and service discovery.
• Experience with Kubernetes networking, CNI, service mesh, or secure service-to-service communication.
• Experience debugging difficult infrastructure issues across clusters, nodes, pods, networks, storage, and workloads.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and GitOps workflows, especially Terraform, Argo CD, Helm, or Kustomize.
• Experience building reliable infrastructure for production environments where uptime, security, and operational clarity matter.
• Comfortable working across cloud, on-premise, bare-metal, restricted, or customer-managed environments.
• Strong operational judgement, especially around reliability, resilience, failure domains, and production risk.
• Strong ownership mindset. You can take responsibility for critical systems and improve them over time.
• Clear communication skills. You can explain complex infrastructure problems to engineering and leadership without adding noise.
• Comfortable working in a startup environment with ambiguity, changing priorities, and broad technical responsibility.

Nice to have:

• Experience with distributed storage systems, especially Rook Ceph or Ceph.
• Experience with Cilium, eBPF, cluster mesh, Istio, Envoy, or similar networking and service mesh technologies.
• Experience with multi-cluster Kubernetes environments.
• Experience operating infrastructure in secure, regulated, sovereign, air-gapped, defence, government, fintech, healthcare, critical infrastructure, or customer-managed environments.
• Experience with zero-trust architecture, workload isolation, identity-aware networking, policy enforcement, or runtime security.
• Experience with secrets management tools such as Vault, OpenBao, SOPS, Sealed Secrets, External Secrets, or cloud-native secret managers.
• Experience with supply-chain security, including image signing, vulnerability scanning, SBOMs, artefact verification, admission control, or policy-as-code.
• Experience designing infrastructure where auditability, traceability, and operational evidence are first-class requirements.

Benefits:

• 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.

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.