---
title: 'Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Valarian Technologies Limited'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-infrastructure-engineer-valarian-technologies-limited-london-zq58ng3b6ypr'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-18'
---

# Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Valarian Technologies Limited

- **Company:** Valarian Technologies Limited
- **Location:** London, United Kingdom
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-05-29
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-18
- **Apply:** https://jobs.lever.co/valarian/70b60f6c-9357-4348-a0fc-b841e5d41f0d

## Job description

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:

Valarian Technologies Limited is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applications from individuals regardless of race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender, identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, veteran, amnesty, or any other legally protected characteristic.

We are committed to ensuring a fair and inclusive recruitment process and providing employment opportunities to all applicants. Decision recruitment, hiring, and employment are based solely on qualifications, skills, and experience relevant to the job requirements.

## About Valarian Technologies Limited

## Company Overview
- **One‑liner**: Valarian builds infrastructure that lets enterprises and governments run AI, agents and applications inside a hardened, governed environment where the customer — not the vendor — holds the keys.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: London, United Kingdom
- **Founded**: 2020
- **Founders**: Max Buchan (CEO) and Josh McLaughlin (COO) [valarian.com](https://www.valarian.com/about)

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: National security, defence, regulated enterprise (finance, critical infrastructure)
- **Target customers**: Government / defence organisations and regulated enterprises that require high‑trust, high‑stakes deployment (B2B)
- **Mission / purpose**: “Building the infrastructure to regain control over your high‑consequence systems” — giving customers model independence, auditability and containment without ceding control to a third party [valarian.com](https://www.valarian.com/)

## Products & Services
- **ACRA (Automated Compartmentalised Runtime Architecture)**: A Kubernetes‑native control architecture that extends the cluster with workload‑level governance. Each workload (model, agent, service) runs inside its own enclave with built‑in policy enforcement, default‑deny networking, short‑lived secrets, per‑workload messaging and end‑to‑end audit. ACRA is cloud‑agnostic and can run on AWS, Azure, on‑prem or air‑gapped. [valarian.com](https://www.valarian.com/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric**: **Total Funding – $70M** (Series A of $50M led by New Enterprise Associates, bringing total to $70M) [valarian.com](https://www.valarian.com/)
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: New Enterprise Associates (lead), plus “leading defence and national security investors”; also backed by operators from Palantir, Darktrace and US Special Operations. [valarian.com](https://www.valarian.com/about)
- **Growth Signals**: Deployed across multiple continents; “100s of enclaves deployed”; headcount grew ~18.5% YoY (from 19 to ~24 employees); actively hiring across engineering, compliance and security roles. [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/valarian)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Customer‑held keys**: Even Valarian cannot access customer systems after deployment — governance is enforced by the infrastructure, not by privileged access. [valarian.com](https://www.valarian.com/)
- **Model‑independent**: Customers can run any model (open‑weight or frontier) without vendor lock‑in and without the model provider training on their data. [valarian.com](https://www.valarian.com/)
- **Built by operators with real‑world experience**: The team includes backgrounds from US Special Operations, Palantir, Darktrace, secure communications and high‑assurance systems, giving them credibility in environments where failure has real consequences. [valarian.com](https://www.valarian.com/about)
- **Air‑gap ready**: ACRA is cloud‑agnostic and can operate in disconnected, air‑gapped environments — a rare capability designed from day one for government/defence deployments. [valarian.com](https://www.valarian.com/)

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Scaling the platform for wider enterprise and government adoption; continuing to harden ACRA as the posture layer for AI workloads; expanding the team (engineering, security, compliance) to meet demand from regulated sectors. [jobs.lever.co](https://jobs.lever.co/valarian)
- **Direction for growth**: Maintain “sovereign control” positioning — enabling customers to own their inference, data and access policies regardless of cloud or infrastructure substrate.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Hybrid work setup with a London HQ (flexibility where it matters, structure where it counts). [valarian.com](https://www.valarian.com/careers)
- **Compensation & benefits**: Competitive compensation, equity, and employer‑enhanced pension contributions. [valarian.com](https://www.valarian.com/careers)
- **Engineering environment**: Work on deep infrastructure (Kubernetes, SPIFFE/SPIRE, Cilium, Istio, Vault, NATS, OpenTelemetry) in a high‑trust, high‑impact domain that spans government, defence and regulated enterprise. Engineers are expected to own meaningful pieces of the platform from day one.
- **Notable perks for job seekers**: Opportunity to work on a product that deals with cutting‑edge AI governance and national‑security‑grade isolation; small but growing team (24 people) where contributions are highly visible.

## Sources
1. [valarian.com – Product page](https://www.valarian.com/)
2. [valarian.com – About page](https://www.valarian.com/about)
3. [valarian.com – Careers page](https://www.valarian.com/careers)
4. [jobs.lever.co – Valarian open roles](https://jobs.lever.co/valarian)
5. [linkedin.com – Valarian company page](https://linkedin.com/company/valarian)

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