Valarian on cord

Valarian

Senior Infrastructure Engineer

External position
London, UK
Hiring internally for Valarian?
Computer and Network Security · Cloud and Infrastructure
Innovating for the new era of digital sovereignty
Posted
a week ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
2 days ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: System Engineer
Experience level: Senior
Core skills considered: Kubernetes, Linux, Terraform
Other skills considered: Helm, Security and Compliance

Logistics

Base salary: Undisclosed
Some companies on cord are unable to disclose salaries publicly due to internal company policies. Message the company for salary information.
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

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:

  • 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.

Company Benefits

  • Basic Life / AD&D and long-term disability insurance 100% covered by Valarian
  • Hybrid work arrangements are managed at team level
  • Generous holiday calendar and PTO
  • Relocation assistance (depending on role eligibility)
  • Competitive salary and equity grants
Employer pension contributions:
  • UK roles include enhanced employer pension contributions
  • US roles include 401(k) retirement savings plan – traditional and Roth
Platinum healthcare benefit:
  • For US roles, we offer comprehensive medical, dental and vision plans at little to no cost to you
  • For UK roles, Valarian will cover the full cost of the Private Medical Insurance (PMI) premium
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Valarian
Position posted a week ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
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