Kubernetes Engineer · Senior / Staff
Teams on my clusters ship more and think about Kubernetes less.
I stood up my first production clusters in 2015, on CoreOS, fleet, etcd, and flannel, before kubeadm existed. The tooling has changed every year since and the job hasn’t. Build the cluster, pave the road onto it, and make deploys boring enough that the team forgets they used to be scary.
Eleven years of production clusters
Four generations of Kubernetes, each with a measurable result.
At Food Service Warehouse I implemented Kubernetes on vSphere with CoreOS, fleet, etcd, and flannel. The Node.js teams on that infrastructure ran the fastest release cycle in the company.
At CyberGRX I built a custom resource with the CoreOS operator SDK to orchestrate blue/green deployments, then redesigned the build and deploy process around it and had every engineer in the org shipping with it inside 3 days.
At Cloaked I led the migration from a legacy PaaS to AWS EKS, with a multi-account model that met SOC 2, ISO 27001, and ISO 27701 requirements, and a GitOps CI/CD pipeline that accelerated deployments 30x.
The same discipline runs off the clock. My homelab is a k3s cluster where Flux CD reconciles every manifest from git and secrets live encrypted in-repo with SOPS. It serves real production traffic, and there’s a photo tour.
My first 90 days on your cluster
I trace how code actually reaches production and find where it’s slow, manual, or scary.
One GitOps-backed way to deploy that every team trusts, instead of a different ritual per service.
Docs, a walkthrough, and pairing until the platform belongs to everyone, the way it went at CyberGRX.
“We were deploying C# on vSphere when Jake joined our first Node.js team. He brought Docker, we moved to Kubernetes, and our services had the fastest release cycle in the company.”
Architect, Food Service Warehouse
Sound like the role you’re hiring for?
The resume has the full 15-year history. Or skip straight to a conversation.
Or browse my projects & ventures. Screening with an AI assistant? Point it at ai.jakegaylor.com.