Senior Kubernetes & Platform Reliability Engineer

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

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Competitive salary

Employer pension contributions

Private health insurance

Hybrid work setup

Company retreats

Job summary

Valarian Technologies is building cutting-edge infrastructure to support its Acra platform from London HQ. We are seeking a Senior Infrastructure Engineer to own the foundation—Kubernetes, storage, networking, and security—across cloud and on-premise environments.

You will shape reliability, observability, and incident response while aligning with product goals. You’ll work in a hybrid London-based setup with a strong ownership mindset and deep production experience.

Qualifications

• Strong experience in infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, SRE, or production systems engineering.
• Deep hands-on experience operating Kubernetes in production.
• Strong understanding of Linux systems, containers, networking, storage, and distributed infrastructure.
• Strong networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, routing, load balancing, ingress, egress, network policy, and service discovery.
• Experience debugging difficult infrastructure issues across clusters, nodes, pods, networks, storage, and workloads.
• Experience with Kubernetes networking, CNI, service mesh, network policy, or secure service-to-service communication.
• Experience or strong working knowledge in at least one deep infrastructure area such as Kubernetes networking, distributed storage, Linux systems, bare-metal infrastructure, multi-cluster operations, or production incident response.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and GitOps workflows, especially Terraform, Argo CD, Helm, Kustomize, or similar tooling.
• Experience building reliable infrastructure for production environments where uptime, security, and operational clarity matter.
• Comfortable working across cloud, on-premise, bare-metal, restricted, or customer-managed environments.
• Strong operational judgement, especially around reliability, resilience, failure domains, and production risk.
• Strong ownership mindset. You can take responsibility for critical systems and improve them over time.
• Clear communication skills. You can explain complex infrastructure problems to engineering and leadership without adding noise.
• Comfortable working in a startup environment with ambiguity, changing priorities, and broad technical responsibility.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

Production Kubernetes

Linux systems

Networking fundamentals

Service mesh

GitOps

Observability

Reliability engineering

Security controls

Operational judgment

Ownership mindset

Tools

Kubernetes

Linux

Cilium

eBPF

Istio

Rook Ceph

Terraform

Argo CD

GitOps

Helm

Job description

Valarian Technologies is building cutting-edge infrastructure to support its Acra platform from London HQ. We are seeking a Senior Infrastructure Engineer to own the foundation—Kubernetes, storage, networking, and security—across cloud and on-premise environments.

You will shape reliability, observability, and incident response while aligning with product goals. You’ll work in a hybrid London-based setup with a strong ownership mindset and deep production experience.