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 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 In this role, you will help build and operate the backend and platform services behind ACRA: our secure Kubernetes platform for controlled compute, data governance, and AI-driven security operations. You will work mainly in Go, building services across backend engineering, Kubernetes, platform infrastructure, and security. This includes systems designed for reliability, scale, and security from the start, including how AI can help define, enforce, and reason about security controls. You will join a focused engineering team that values ownership, direct feedback, and support. You will start with clear areas of work, then take on more autonomy over services and platform direction as you build context. This is a strong fit for someone who wants to become excellent across backend, platform, Kubernetes, and security, and help build a serious security platform from an early stage. What you’ll do: As part of the team, you will: Develop backend services, APIs, and platform components using Go. Own services from design and implementation through testing, deployment, and production monitoring. Work with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, GitOps, and secrets management. Build platform features for workload isolation, policy enforcement, audit logging, and identity-aware communication. Design event-driven distributed systems for resilience and scalability. Improve metrics, logging, tracing, and incident response. Work with engineering and product teams to turn requirements into technical solutions. Own specific platform areas and contribute independently. Improve how the team reviews code, deploys changes, and learns from incidents. What we are looking for: Backend engineering experience, with some exposure to Go. Experience building APIs, backend services, or microservices. Experience working with Docker and containers. Experience deploying to, developing on, or building with Kubernetes. Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows. Familiarity with GitOps, Argo, container registries, secrets, or deployment security. Understanding of event-driven architecture, asynchronous workflows, or distributed systems. System design knowledge around reliability, scalability, observability, and failure handling. Ability to debug issues across applications, services, and infrastructure. Interest in why the platform is being built, not just what needs to be implemented. Ownership, curiosity, and ability to work independently. Willingness to learn across backend, platform, infrastructure, and DevOps. Nice to have: Security, regulated, or high-trust environments such as defence, government, fintech, hea