Senior Software Engineer

About Valarian Technologies

Valarian Technologies is a dual-use technology company committed to building essential tools that address evolving global security challenges beyond conventional military domains. By focusing on asymmetric threats affecting technological, economic, and democratic foundations, Valarian designs infrastructure-agnostic secure enclaves through its platform Acra (named after the Greek word for citadel). Acra enhances operational resilience for mission-critical systems, facilitates secure adoption of emerging technologies, protects intellectual property, and supports secure communication in disaster response and zero-trust environments.

Joining Valarian means being part of dynamic, collaborative teams developing innovative software, platforms, and infrastructure tailored to address critical security needs.

Role Overview

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will architect, develop, and maintain backend and platform components of Acra—a sophisticated Kubernetes-based security platform. The role requires building microservices and APIs in Go, with responsibilities spanning from system design to deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting, and operations. You will influence core platform features such as identity-aware communication, lifecycle orchestration, policy enforcement, auditability, and secure application execution while focusing on trust boundaries and operational reliability.

Primary Responsibilities

• Develop and manage backend services, microservices, and APIs using Go.
• Lead end-to-end ownership of services including design, implementation, containerization, deployment, visibility, and production support.
• Create event-driven, scalable, resilient, and observable systems.
• Enhance Docker images, Kubernetes workloads, CI/CD pipelines, and GitOps workflows leveraging ArgoCD.
• Manage container registries, secrets handling, secure configurations, and deployment automations.
• Contribute to platform architecture, focusing on security boundaries, operational models, and lifecycle orchestration.
• Develop platform capabilities that include workload isolation, policy-driven controls, audit trails, and identity-aware service communications.
• Collaborate across product and leadership teams to translate ambiguous requirements into robust technical solutions.
• Make informed technical decisions with clear communication of trade-offs.
• Improve observability practices through monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, and incident diagnostics.
• Raise engineering standards by conducting design and code reviews, improving documentation, and refining operational procedures.
• Operate independently with strong ownership and product-focused thinking in a startup environment.

Candidate Profile

• Proven experience as a senior backend engineer, preferably with practical Go programming expertise.
• Demonstrated ownership of production-grade services beyond feature delivery.
• Experience designing APIs, microservices, backend systems, or distributed architectures.
• Hands-on knowledge of Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD tools.
• Familiarity with GitOps, Argo workflows, container registries, secrets management, and secure deployment pipelines.
• Strong fundamentals in system design emphasizing reliability, scalability, observability, and failure mitigation.
• Capability to analyze security considerations, operational risks, and production failure modes.
• Skillful in troubleshooting cross-layer issues spanning applications, services, and underlying infrastructure.
• Comfortable shaping technical solutions from non-specific requirements.
• A product-centric mindset with focus on the platform’s purpose and impact.
• Self-motivated, responsible, and ownership-driven working style.
• Open to giving and receiving constructive feedback, and committed to elevating team practices.
• Ready to contribute across backend, platform, infrastructure, and DevOps domains.

Preferred Additional Experience

• Exposure to secure or regulated environments like defense, government, fintech, healthcare, critical infrastructure, or sovereign cloud sectors.
• Knowledge of zero-trust architectures, identity-aware systems, policy enforcement, and workload isolation.
• Familiarity with service mesh, network policies, ingress/egress controls, and secure inter-service communication.
• Experience with observability tools encompassing metrics, logs, tracing, alerting, and incident management.
• Understanding of supply-chain security practices such as image signing, vulnerability detection, SBOMs, artifact validation, and admission controls.
• Hands-on with secrets management solutions like Vault, SOPS, Sealed Secrets, or cloud native secret managers.
• Working with systems emphasizing auditability, traceability, and operational evidence as integral features.
• Background in startups or platform/infrastructure/product engineering with broad ownership responsibilities.

Benefits

• Equity ownership reflecting your contribution to building the platform.
• Competitive salary commensurate with skills and experience.
• Employer pension contributions to support your future financial security.
• Private health insurance ensuring your personal well-being.
• Hybrid working arrangements accommodating individual preferences.
• Company retreats and meetups with respect for work-life balance for team bonding.

Culture and Work Environment

Valarian fosters a culture rooted in inclusivity, empathy, and flexibility, empowering employees to reach their full potential. Though the company works on critical challenges, relationships and collaborative energy are prioritized, with teams gathering onsite at the London headquarters three days a week to support and innovate together.

Additional Notes on Hiring

AI-powered tools may assist the recruitment process by analyzing applications and identifying patterns. However, all final hiring decisions are made by humans.