Senior 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. The role involves designing, building, and operating backend and platform services for ACRA, a complex security-focused Kubernetes platform, with a focus on reliability, observability, scalability, and security.

Responsibilities:

• Build and own backend services, APIs, microservices, and platform components in Go
• Own services from system design through implementation, deployment, observability, and production operations
• Design event-driven, scalable, observable, and resilient systems
• Build and improve Docker images, Kubernetes workloads, CI/CD pipelines, and Argo/GitOps workflows
• Work with container registries, secrets, secure configuration, and deployment automation
• Contribute to platform architecture, system design, security boundaries, and operational models
• Help build platform capabilities such as workload isolation, policy enforcement, auditability, and identity-aware communication
• Work closely with product, leadership, and engineering to turn ambiguous requirements into reliable technical solutions
• Make pragmatic technical trade-offs and explain them clearly
• Improve monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, and production debugging
• Raise engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, and operational improvements
• Operate independently in a startup environment with strong ownership and product thinking

Requirements:

• Senior backend engineering experience, ideally with hands-on Go experience
• Experience owning production services, not just building features
• Experience building APIs, backend services, microservices, or distributed systems
• Strong experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD
• Familiarity with GitOps, Argo, container registries, secrets, and secure deployment workflows
• Strong system design fundamentals, especially around reliability, scalability, observability, and failure handling
• Ability to reason about security boundaries, operational risk, and production failure modes
• Experience debugging issues across applications, services, and infrastructure
• Comfort working from ambiguous requirements and shaping the technical approach
• Product-minded engineering judgement: you care about why the platform is being built, not just what needs to be implemented
• A self-driven, ownership-oriented way of working
• Comfortable giving and receiving feedback, reviewing designs, and helping improve team standards
• Willingness to work across backend, platform, infrastructure, and DevOps areas
• Secure or regulated environments, such as defence, government, fintech, healthcare, critical infrastructure, or sovereign cloud
• Zero-trust architecture, identity-aware systems, policy enforcement, or workload isolation
• Service mesh, network policy, ingress/egress control, or secure service-to-service communication
• Observability tooling, including metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and incident response
• Supply-chain security concepts such as image signing, vulnerability scanning, SBOMs, artifact verification, or admission control
• Secrets management tools such as Vault, SOPS, Sealed Secrets, External Secrets, or cloud-native secret managers
• Systems where auditability, traceability, and operational evidence are first-class requirements
• Startup, platform, infrastructure, or product engineering environments with broad ownership