cluster-deployment-engineer

Cluster Deployment Engineer

When to Use

• Bootstrap, upgrade, or resize a Kubernetes cluster (managed or self-hosted)
• Install or upgrade cluster add-ons: ingress controller, CNI, metrics, DNS, cert-manager
• Deploy workloads via Helm, Kustomize, or raw manifests with health checks
• Configure namespaces, resource quotas, LimitRanges, PriorityClasses
• Design cluster RBAC, ServiceAccounts, and namespace isolation
• Operate GitOps controllers (Argo CD, Flux) targeting cluster state
• Troubleshoot Pending pods, ImagePullBackOff, networking, and control-plane issues
• Plan multi-cluster or environment-per-cluster topology

When NOT to Use

• Design VPC, subnets, IAM, or Terraform modules for cloud foundation → infrastructure-engineer
• Author or fix generic CI/CD pipelines and build systems → devops
• Choose canary, blue-green, or feature-flag rollout strategy → deployment-strategist
• Build developer portals, scaffolders, or platform product roadmap → platform-engineer
• Pipeline SAST, SBOM, signing gates → devsecops
• Cross-service architecture ADRs → senior-system-architecture
• SEV program and paging policy → incident-management-engineer
• Host/GPU inventory, stranded kW, hardware refresh → data-center-compute-supply-efficiency

Related skills

Need	Skill
Cloud networking and cluster IaC	infrastructure-engineer
VPC, IAM, load balancers for clusters	cloud-engineer
CI/CD, GitOps pipelines, delivery SLOs	devops
Release rollout and rollback planning	deployment-strategist
Multi-tenant platform product	platform-engineer
Admission policies, image scan, runtime security	devsecops
Product tenant isolation on K8s	product-infrastructure-security-engineer
Launch comms for cluster changes	communication-lead
Data center / colo facility design	data-center-design-execution-lead
Compute supply and DC resource efficiency	data-center-compute-supply-efficiency
RL distributed training workloads	ml-systems-engineer-rl-engineering
Capacity delivery and rack-ready gates	senior-data-center-capacity-delivery-manager
On-site rack-and-stack, cabling, sign-off	field-services-engineer

Core Workflows

1. Cluster lifecycle

1. Requirements — version skew policy, HA, regions, node SKUs, autoscaling bounds
2. Bootstrap — control plane, node groups, OIDC for workloads
3. Add-ons — ordered install (CNI → DNS → ingress → certs → metrics)
4. Upgrade — control plane first, node cordon/drain, validate API and workloads
5. Decommission — drain, backup etcd/state if self-managed, destroy order

See references/cluster_lifecycle.md.

2. Workload delivery

1. Package — Helm chart or Kustomize overlay per env
2. Values — resources, replicas, probes, affinity, topology spread
3. Apply — dry-run, diff, apply; watch rollout status
4. Verify — readiness, Service endpoints, ingress, smoke test
5. Rollback — helm rollback or GitOps revert commit

See references/workload_delivery.md.

3. Networking and ingress

• Services, Endpoints, EndpointSlices
• Ingress / Gateway API, TLS termination
• NetworkPolicy default-deny + allow lists
• Service mesh only when required (complexity cost)

See references/networking_ingress.md.

4. Security and tenancy

• Namespace per team/env; quotas and LimitRanges
• RBAC: least privilege; no cluster-admin for apps
• Secrets: external secrets operator; no plain Secrets in git
• Pod Security Admission (restricted baseline)

Pair with devsecops for admission controllers and image policy.

See references/cluster_security_rbac.md.

5. GitOps at cluster scope

• One repo or path per cluster/environment
• App-of-apps or directory per add-on
• Sync waves for ordering; health checks and sync hooks
• Drift: prefer Git as source of truth

See references/gitops_cluster.md.

6. Troubleshooting

Symptom	First checks
Pending	Events, requests vs allocatable, taints, PDB
CrashLoopBackOff	Logs, probes, config mounts, OOM
No traffic	Endpoints, NetworkPolicy, ingress rules
Slow deploy	Image pull, init containers, quota

See references/troubleshooting.md.

Output standards

• Manifest or Helm change with env-specific values table
• Pre/post upgrade checklist with rollback step
• Runbook snippet: symptoms, commands, escalation to infrastructure-engineer if cloud API/IaC

When to load references

• Bootstrap, upgrade, nodes → references/cluster_lifecycle.md
• Helm, Kustomize, rollouts → references/workload_delivery.md
• Ingress, CNI, policies → references/networking_ingress.md
• RBAC, quotas, PSA → references/cluster_security_rbac.md
• Argo CD / Flux → references/gitops_cluster.md
• Incidents and debug → references/troubleshooting.md