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 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 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,