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.

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. 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

In this role, you will help build and operate the backend and platform services behind ACRA: our secure Kubernetes platform for controlled compute, data governance, and AI-driven security operations. You will work mainly in Go, building services across backend engineering, Kubernetes, platform infrastructure, and security. This includes systems designed for reliability, scale, and security from the start, including how AI can help define, enforce, and reason about security controls. You will join a focused engineering team that values ownership, direct feedback, and support. You will start with clear areas of work, then take on more autonomy over services and platform direction as you build context. This is a strong fit for someone who wants to become excellent across backend, platform, Kubernetes, and security, and help build a serious security platform from an early stage.

What you’ll do:

• Develop backend services, APIs, and platform components using Go.
• Own services from design and implementation through testing, deployment, and production monitoring.
• Work with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, GitOps, and secrets management.
• Build platform features for workload isolation, policy enforcement, audit logging, and identity-aware communication.
• Design event-driven distributed systems for resilience and scalability.
• Improve metrics, logging, tracing, and incident response.
• Work with engineering and product teams to turn requirements into technical solutions.
• Own specific platform areas and contribute independently.
• Improve how the team reviews code, deploys changes, and learns from incidents.

What we are looking for:

• Backend engineering experience, with some exposure to Go.
• Experience building APIs, backend services, or microservices.
• Experience working with Docker and containers.
• Experience deploying to, developing on, or building with Kubernetes.
• Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows.
• Familiarity with GitOps, Argo, container registries, secrets, or deployment security.
• Understanding of event-driven architecture, asynchronous workflows, or distributed systems.
• System design knowledge around reliability, scalability, observability, and failure handling.
• Ability to debug issues across applications, services, and infrastructure.
• Interest in why the platform is being built, not just what needs to be implemented.
• Ownership, curiosity, and ability to work independently.
• Willingness to learn across backend, platform, infrastructure, and DevOps.

Nice to have:

• Security, regulated, or high-trust environments such as defence, government, fintech, healthcare, critical infrastructure, or sovereign cloud.
• Kubernetes security areas such as zero trust, workload isolation, identity-aware systems, network policy, service mesh, or policy enforcement.
• Platform security practices such as secrets management, supply-chain security, admission control, auditability, and operational evidence.
• Observability and operations, including metrics, logs, traces, alerting, incident response, and debugging production systems.
• Experience in startup, platform, infrastructure, or product engineering environments with broad ownership.

You do not need to have worked with all of these. They are areas you may learn and build with us.

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.
• 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.

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.