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;
• 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

We are looking for a Platform Engineer to help build the internal platform capabilities that allow our engineering teams to move quickly without compromising security, reliability, or operational control. This role is more software and product-oriented than a traditional infrastructure role. You will work closely with backend engineers, infrastructure engineers, product teams, and leadership to design and build the tooling, workflows, integrations, and platform primitives that make ACRA easier to develop, deploy, operate, and extend. You will treat the platform as a product. Your users are our engineers. Your goal is to make the safe, reliable, and repeatable path the easiest path: through clean abstractions, useful automation, golden paths, reusable templates, deployment workflows, observability patterns, and developer-facing tooling.

We are looking for someone hands-on, curious, and comfortable working across a broad set of DevOps, platform, and CNCF tools. You should have a software engineering mindset and care about maintainability, automation, user experience, reliability, and long-term platform design, not just scripts and infrastructure tasks. You should be able to take ownership of defined areas, move quickly, work well with engineers across the stack, and turn ambiguous platform needs into useful, reliable systems. This is not an internal IT role, cloud administration role, or generic DevOps support role. You will help build the platform as a product.

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.

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. 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.