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 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. 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 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