Senior Software 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, and zero-trust / least-privilege environments for M&A, attorney-client privileged communications, etc. And we’ve only scratched the surface.   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 design, build, and operate backend and platform services for ACRA, a complex security-focused Kubernetes platform that needs to be reliable, observable, scalable, and secure from the start. You will work primarily in Go, building microservices, APIs, internal platform services, and event-driven systems. You will own services end to end: from system design and implementation through to containerisation, deployment, monitoring, debugging, and production operations. You will help shape the infrastructure and delivery foundations around the platform, including Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows, container registries, secrets management, deployment automation, and Argo-based delivery flows. You will contribute to core platform primitives 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 requires someone who can reason clearly about trust boundaries, failure domains, and operational responsibility. This is not a role for someone who only wants to take tickets. We are looking for someone who understands the product vision, challenges assumptions, proposes better designs, and helps translate ambiguous requirements into robust technical systems. As ACRA grows, this role offers a clear path to increasing technical ownership and influence. You will not just build services and move on; you will help maintain, evolve, and scale the systems you own over time. You will also help raise the bar for how we design, review, deploy, operate, and learn as an engineering team. You do not need to have worked with every tool in our stack before. We are looking for strong engineering judgement, curiosity, ownership, and the ability to build reliable systems in complex environments.   What you’ll do:   Build and own backend services, APIs, microservices, and platform components in Go. Own services from system design through implementation, deployment, observability, and production operations. Design event-driven, scalable, observable, and resilient systems. Build and improve Docker images, Kubernetes workloads, CI/CD pipelines, and Argo/GitOps workflows. Work with container registries, secrets, secure configuration, and deployment automation. Contribute to platform architecture, system design, security boundaries, and operational models. Help build platform capabilities such as workload isolation, policy enforcement, auditability, and identity-aware communication. Work closely with product, leadership, and engineering to turn ambiguous requirements into reliable technical solutions. Make pragmatic technical trade-offs and explain them clearly. Improve monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, and production debugging. Raise engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, and operational improvements. Operate independently in a startup environment with strong ownership and product thinking.   What we are looking for: