Senior DataOps Engineer — Data Platform Reliability

The Role

What you’ll do:

What you’ll bring:

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 a 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.

Additional information

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.