Senior DataOps Engineer — Data Platform Reliability

Valarian Technologies; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Competitive salary

Employer pension

Private health insurance

Hybrid work

Gym membership

Company retreats

Job summary

Valarian Technologies in London seeks a seasoned data platform engineer to design, deploy and operate production data pipelines and data services. You will own reliability, incident response and observability across Kubernetes-based workloads, with strong emphasis on CI/CD, GitOps and secure, auditable processing.

You will work closely with data engineers and ACRA platform engineers, coordinating across customer-controlled environments.

Qualifications

• Demonstrable experience operating production data pipelines or data platforms, with ownership of reliability and incident resolution.
• Strong practical Kubernetes, container and Linux skills, including troubleshooting workloads, networking, resource limits and persistent storage.
• Experience building automated delivery workflows using Git, CI/CD and declarative configuration; familiarity with Helm, GitOps or equivalent approaches.
• Python and shell scripting for automation, plus sufficient SQL to investigate processing failures and database performance.
• Experience with workflow orchestration, such as Airflow, Dagster, Prefect or an equivalent system.
• Understanding of reliable processing patterns: idempotency, bounded retries, duplicate delivery, incremental processing and safe replay.
• Experience implementing metrics, logs, dashboards and alerting, with meaningful service and data reliability targets.
• Practical experience with stateful systems, controlled migrations, backup and recovery, secrets management and least-privilege access.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain CI/CD and GitOps workflows for data applications, pipelines, configuration and database changes, including validation, promotion and rollback.
• Develop reusable tooling for scheduling, dependency management, retries, checkpoints, replay and backfills.
• Establish monitoring and actionable alerts for pipeline freshness, completeness, processing latency, failures and resource usage.
• Operate workload-owned data services and coordinate with ACRA platform owners for shared database, messaging and storage services.
• Implement and exercise recovery procedures, including backup restoration, interrupted processing and failed upgrades.
• Integrate data workloads with ACRA’s identity, secrets and network controls, preserving enclave isolation and authorised access.
• Investigate production incidents, improve runbooks and automate recurring operational work.

Skills

Kubernetes

Linux

CI/CD

Git

Python

Shell scripting

SQL

Workflow orchestration

Observability

Stateful systems

Incident resolution

IDEMPOTENCY

Retry patterns

Tools

OpenShift

ArgoCD

Terraform

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

PostgreSQL

Graph databases

Document stores

Messaging systems

Airflow

Dagster

Prefect

Job description

Valarian: A New Era of Sovereign Intelligence

Valarian is a dual use technology company building critical tools to safeguard the future in an era of evolving global security challenges. Backed by a Series A funding round of $50m led by NEA, we are rethinking security beyond traditional military domains to address asymmetric threats that impact our technological advantage, economic strength, and democratic institutions. We provide the control infrastructure that allows government and regulated enterprise to put frontier-class AI to work safely.

We are bringing a frontier AI experience inside secure boundaries for the first time. Our technology supports mission critical workflows across government, healthcare, and enterprise, including:

• Scaling open-weight models without external inference endpoints.


• Putting frontier class AI to work across organisations through partnerships with other leading AI startups such as Perplexity.


• Increasing operational resiliency for air gapped, on prem, and cloud based systems.


• Securing intellectual property and maintaining auditability for high stakes enterprise environments.


• Facilitating secure information flow during disaster response, M&A due diligence, and privileged legal communications.

We’ve only scratched the surface. Built in Britain by veterans of the Ministry of Defence, British Forces, Darktrace, and elite engineering backgrounds, we are driven by a shared mission to safeguard western democracy . Whether you join our London HQ or our wider global organisation, you’ll be part of a collaborative, high performing team creating the cutting edge software and infrastructure that defines the frontier of enterprise AI.

The Role

You will make the data services and processing workloads supporting ACRA and Valarie reproducible to deploy, observable in production and safe to recover. You will work closely with data engineers and ACRA platform engineers across customer-controlled environments.

What you’ll do:

• Build and maintain CI/CD and GitOps workflows for data applications, pipelines, configuration and database changes, including validation, promotion and rollback.


• Develop reusable tooling for scheduling, dependency management, retries, checkpoints, replay and backfills.


• Establish monitoring and actionable alerts for pipeline freshness, completeness, processing latency, failures and resource usage.


• Operate workload-owned data services and coordinate with ACRA platform owners for shared database, messaging and storage services.


• Implement and exercise recovery procedures, including backup restoration, interrupted processing and failed upgrades.


• Integrate data workloads with ACRA’s identity, secrets and network controls, preserving enclave isolation and authorised access.


• Investigate production incidents, improve runbooks and automate recurring operational work.

What you’ll bring:

• Demonstrable experience operating production data pipelines or data platforms, with ownership of reliability and incident resolution.


• Strong practical Kubernetes, container and Linux skills, including troubleshooting workloads, networking, resource limits and persistent storage.


• Experience building automated delivery workflows using Git, CI/CD and declarative configuration; familiarity with Helm, GitOps or equivalent approaches.


• Python and shell scripting for automation, plus sufficient SQL to investigate processing failures and database performance.


• Experience with workflow orchestration, such as Airflow, Dagster, Prefect or an equivalent system.


• Understanding of reliable processing patterns: idempotency, bounded retries, duplicate delivery, incremental processing and safe replay.


• Experience implementing metrics, logs, dashboards and alerting, with meaningful service and data reliability targets.


• Practical experience with stateful systems, controlled migrations, backup and recovery, secrets management and least-privilege access.

Nice to have:

• OpenShift, on-premises deployments or environments with restricted connectivity.


• ArgoCD, Terraform, Prometheus, Grafana or OpenTelemetry.


• Operating PostgreSQL, graph databases, document stores or messaging systems.


• Delivering software in regulated or security-sensitive customer environments.

Benefits

Our benefits are designed to ensure our employees feel taken care of and are proud to be part of the Valarian team. We are committed to consistently enhancing our benefit package, taking into account the overall well-being and needs of our teammates. Here are the key benefits accessible to all employees at Valarian Technologies:

• Equity – because you have the right to own what you’re building


• A competitive salary – because we value your unique skills


• Employer pension contributions – because you deserve a secure future


• Private health insurance - because your health is important to us


• Hybrid work setup – because everyone has different needs


• Gym memberships - because staying active fuels productivity


• Rewarding company retreats and meetups that respect your work/life balance – because we love getting to know each other

Life at Valarian

Our culture is built on inclusivity, compassion and flexibility – we want everyone to be empowered to achieve their goals at Valarian.

The work we do is vital, but so are the connections that make it happen. We thrive on the shared energy, spontaneous conversations, and mutual trust built when we spend time together. We operate on an office first hybrid model, regularly gathering in our London office to support one another and collaborate.

Valarian Technologies Limited is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applications from invdividuals 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.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analysing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgement. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.