Devops Engineer Rancher Kubernetes Administrator (Remote)

Company Description

Welcome to Lucerna Tech, Your Global IT Partner for Specialized services & Staff Augmentation. With a global reach and expertise in IT staff augmentation, we seamlessly integrate skilled professionals into your teams to drive digital success.

Role Description

This is a full-time remote role for a DevOps Engineer – Rancher Kubernetes Administrator (RKE2) at Lucerna Tech. The role involves tasks related to infrastructure as code, software development, continuous integration, system administration, and Linux.

Key Responsibilities:

• Deploy, configure, and manage Rancher environments in production and non-production environments.
• Administer Kubernetes clusters through Rancher, ensuring high availability, security, and performance across the infrastructure.
• Perform ongoing maintenance, upgrades, and patching of the Rancher and Kubernetes clusters.
• Provision, configure, and manage Kubernetes clusters using Rancher, ensuring effective orchestration of containers across multiple environments (on-premises and cloud).
• Monitor and optimize the Kubernetes infrastructure to maintain performance, security, and reliability.
• Implement resource allocation policies, namespace management, and role-based access control (RBAC) for multi-tenant Kubernetes environments.
• Implement and maintain security best practices, including network policies, pod security policies, and Kubernetes security configurations.
• Ensure secure communication and encryption (SSL/TLS) within the Kubernetes cluster and between services.
• Set up auditing, monitoring, and alerting for security events, and respond promptly to security incidents or vulnerabilities.
• Plan and execute horizontal and vertical scaling of Kubernetes clusters and services based on resource utilization and business needs.
• Ensure high availability of the cluster and its workloads by implementing redundancy, failover, and backup strategies.
• Manage Kubernetes storage and persistent volumes for stateful applications.
• Set up and maintain monitoring and alerting for the Rancher platform and Kubernetes clusters using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana).
• Monitor the health and performance of Kubernetes clusters, and respond to incidents or issues affecting workloads.
• Ensure proper logging of cluster and container events for troubleshooting and performance analysis.
• Integrate Rancher-managed Kubernetes clusters with CI/CD pipelines to enable continuous delivery and deployment.
• Work with DevOps and development teams to support containerized application deployment, rollback, and scaling.
• Automate deployments using Helm, GitOps, and other tools to manage infrastructure as code.
• Develop and maintain automation scripts to manage cluster operations (scaling, monitoring, backups) using tools like Bash, Python, or Ansible.
• Automate the deployment and scaling of Kubernetes workloads, including creating and maintaining Helm charts.
• Diagnose and resolve issues related to Kubernetes clusters, workloads, and networking.
• Provide technical support to development and operations teams to resolve Rancher or Kubernetes-related issues.
• Monitor cluster resource utilization, identify bottlenecks, and make performance optimizations.
• Implement and maintain backup and recovery strategies for Kubernetes workloads, including persistent storage.
• Develop and test disaster recovery processes to minimize downtime and ensure quick recovery from system failures.
• Create and maintain detailed documentation for the Rancher and Kubernetes environments, including configurations, processes, and troubleshooting guides.
• Maintain runbooks and operational playbooks for Rancher administrators and DevOps teams.

Required Skills:

• Strong experience with the installation, configuration, and administration of Rancher for managing Kubernetes clusters.
• Proficiency in Rancher 2.x and its multi-cluster management capabilities.
• Deep understanding of Kubernetes architecture, including API server, etcd, kubelet, scheduler, and controller manager.
• Experience in Kubernetes cluster provisioning, upgrades, security, monitoring, and lifecycle management.
• Proficiency in containerization technologies, such as Docker, and their orchestration using Kubernetes.
• Experience with Helm charts, Kustomize, or similar tools for managing Kubernetes manifests.
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes networking, including CNI plugins, Ingress controllers, and service discovery.
• Experience in configuring and managing load balancers (e.g., Traefik, NGINX) for Kubernetes workloads.
• Familiarity with monitoring and logging tools like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, and Fluentd for monitoring Kubernetes clusters.
• Experience with deploying and managing Kubernetes clusters on cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• Familiarity with managed Kubernetes services (e.g., EKS, AKS, GKE) and their integration with Rancher.
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes security, including role-based access control (RBAC), network policies, and pod security.
• Experience with service mesh technologies (e.g., Istio, Linkerd) for securing microservices communication.
• Proficiency in scripting languages like Bash, Python, or PowerShell for automating tasks and configurations.
• Experience with configuration management and automation tools like Ansible, Terraform, or Chef.
• Familiarity with DevOps practices, including continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and their integration with Rancher/Kubernetes.
• Strong problem-solving skills for diagnosing and resolving issues with Kubernetes, containers, and network configurations.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience with service mesh (e.g., Istio) and observability tools for Kubernetes clusters.
• Experience with GitOps frameworks such as ArgoCD or Flux for managing Kubernetes infrastructure.
• Familiarity with backup and restore solutions for Kubernetes workloads, such as Velero.
• Experience in managing persistent storage solutions for Kubernetes, such as NFS, Ceph, or cloud-native storage options.
• Experience with Kubernetes Operators for managing custom resources and deploying complex applications.

Education and Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
• 5+ years of experience managing Linux-based systems.
• 3+ years of experience managing Kubernetes clusters in production environments.
• 2+ years of experience with Rancher or equivalent Kubernetes management platforms.

Certifications:

• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA).
• Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS).
• Rancher certification or equivalent.