Senior Infrastructure 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

We are looking for a Senior Infrastructure Engineer to own and evolve the foundational infrastructure layer behind ACRA.

This is a deep infrastructure role. You will work across Kubernetes, Linux, networking, storage, service-to-service communication, observability, security boundaries, and production operations. You will be responsible for the systems that everything else depends on: clusters, networks, storage layers, ingress and egress paths, runtime infrastructure, deployment foundations, and operational reliability.

Infrastructure is part of the product at Valarian. ACRA only works if the underlying infrastructure is secure, observable, debuggable, resilient, and able to run across cloud, on-premise, bare-metal, sovereign, air-gapped, and customer-managed environments.

We are looking for someone with strong judgement and real production experience. This role values depth, operational correctness, and careful decision-making. You should be comfortable going deep into complex operational problems, understanding failure modes, debugging under pressure, and improving the reliability of the whole platform.

You should be comfortable operating close to the metal: debugging Kubernetes, understanding networking behaviour, reasoning about distributed storage, improving observability, and helping define the infrastructure patterns that ACRA will rely on as it scales.

This is not a generic DevOps support role, cloud administration role, or internal IT role. You will be a critical engineer in the team responsible for the infrastructure foundations of a high-trust platform.

What you’ll do:

• Design, build, operate, and improve Kubernetes-based infrastructure for ACRA.

• Own core infrastructure plumbing across networking, storage, workload scheduling, service communication, ingress, egress, DNS, certificates, and cluster-level security.

• Operate and debug production Kubernetes environments across GCP, on-premise, bare-metal, sovereign cloud, air-gapped, and customer-managed deployments.

• Work on multi-cluster Kubernetes environments, cluster networking, network policy, service mesh, and secure service-to-service communication.

• Operate and evolve distributed storage systems, including storage classes, CSI drivers, capacity planning, replication, recovery, and failure handling.

• Work with infrastructure technologies such as Kubernetes, Linux, Cilium, eBPF, Istio, Rook Ceph, Terraform, Argo CD, GitOps, Helm, and related CNCF tooling.

• Build infrastructure automation that improves repeatability, reliability, and operational safety.

• Improve observability across infrastructure layers, including metrics, logs, traces, alerting, dashboards, and operational runbooks.

• Investigate and resolve complex production issues across networking, storage, Kubernetes, Linux, and application infrastructure.

• Contribute to incident response, root-cause analysis, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and production readiness.

• Define infrastructure standards, operational boundaries, security controls, and deployment patterns across the platform.

• Work closely with engineering teams to make services easier to deploy, operate, monitor, and debug.

• Contribute to the long-term technical direction of the DevOps department and the infrastructure foundations of ACRA.

What we are looking for:

• Strong experience in infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, SRE, or production systems engineering.

• Deep hands-on experience operating Kubernetes in production.

• Strong understanding of Linux systems, containers, networking, storage, and distributed infrastructure.

• Strong networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, routing, load balancing, ingress, egress, network policy, and service discovery.

• Experience debugging difficult infrastructure issues across clusters, nodes, pods, networks, storage, and workloads.

• Experience with Kubernetes networking, CNI, service mesh, network policy, or secure service-to-service communication.

• Experience or strong working knowledge in at least one deep infrastructure area such as Kubernetes networking, distributed storage, Linux systems, bare-metal infrastructure, multi-cluster operations, or production incident response.

• Experience with infrastructure as code and GitOps workflows, especially Terraform, Argo CD, Helm, Kustomize, or similar tooling.

• Experience building reliable infrastructure for production environments where uptime, security, and operational clarity matter.

• Comfortable working across cloud, on-premise, bare-metal, restricted, or customer-managed environments.

• Strong operational judgement, especially around reliability, resilience, failure domains, and production risk.

• Strong ownership mindset. You can take responsibility for critical systems and improve them over time.

• Clear communication skills. You can explain complex infrastructure problems to engineering and leadership without adding noise.

• Comfortable working in a startup environment with ambiguity, changing priorities, and broad technical responsibility.

Nice to have:

• Experience with distributed storage systems, especially Rook Ceph or Ceph.

• Experience with Cilium, eBPF, cluster mesh, Istio, Envoy, or similar networking and service mesh technologies.

• Experience with multi-cluster Kubernetes environments.

• Experience operating Kubernetes or OpenShift outside simple managed-cloud environments, including bare-metal, VMware, sovereign, air-gapped, regulated, or customer-managed deployments.

• Experience operating infrastructure in secure, regulated, sovereign, air-gapped, defence, government, fintech, healthcare, critical infrastructure, or customer-managed environments.

• Experience with zero-trust architecture, workload isolation, identity-aware networking, policy enforcement, or runtime security.

• Experience with secrets management tools such as Vault, OpenBao, SOPS, Sealed Secrets, External Secrets, or cloud-native secret managers.

• Experience with observability stacks such as Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, ELK, Dynatrace, or similar tooling.

• Experience with supply-chain security, including image signing, vulnerability scanning, SBOMs, artefact verification, admission control, or policy-as-code.

• Experience designing infrastructure where auditability, traceability, recoverability, and operational evidence are first-class requirements.

Benefits:

Our benefits are designed to ensure our employees feel taken care of and are proud to be a part of the Valarian team. We are committed to consistently enhancing our benefit package, taking into account the overall well-being and needs of our teammates. Here are the key benefits accessible to all employees at Valarian Technologies:

• 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.