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 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

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. ACRA’s architecture separates the control plane, platform enforcement layer, and isolated execution environments, so this role is suited to someone who wants to build backend systems with strong security, reliability, and operational foundations.

You will work closely with senior engineers, product, and the wider engineering team to turn product requirements into reliable technical solutions. We are looking for someone who is comfortable taking ownership of defined pieces of work, asking good questions, and contributing to technical decisions as the platform grows. As you grow in the role, there is a clear path towards senior‑level responsibility. You will begin by owning well‑defined pieces of work with guidance and support from senior engineers. As you build trust, deliver reliably, and understand the systems more deeply, you will be given more autonomy over those areas and the opportunity to lead larger projects. We see progression as a journey from contributing to projects, to owning them, to leading new work and helping shape the platform.

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 5‑6 years backend engineering experience.
• 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:

• Equity – you have the right to own what you’re building.
• A competitive salary – we value your unique skills.
• Employer pension contributions – you deserve a secure future.
• Hybrid work setup – work in a way that suits you.
• Rewarding company retreats and meetups that respect your work/life balance.