Rancher + Fleet GitOps Engineer — Cluster Management & Multi-Environment Delivery

Overview: We run an industrial/energy SaaS platform across 100+ existing Kubernetes clusters (one staging environment per customer, plus production). We'd like to standardize on the Rancher ecosystem to centrally manage our already-running clusters and Rancher Fleet (Continuous Delivery) as our GitOps engine. Goal: A single ecosystem where a chosen version of our UI and API deploys automatically to all staging environments and can be promoted ad-hoc, under human control, to production. What you'll do: - Stand up Rancher and import/register our existing clusters (no provisioning), with consistent labeling (e.g. env=staging, env=prod) and RBAC. - Configure Fleet so a pinned version auto-syncs to every env=staging cluster, version selection controlled by us - Implement ad-hoc, gated production promotion (separate pinned target, paused/manual control, optional approval step). - Safe rollout: health checks, readiness gates, and a demonstrated automatic rollback on a bad deploy. - Document the pipeline (onboarding a new customer cluster, promoting/pausing a version, recovering from a failed sync) + knowledge-transfer session. Engagement structure (milestones): - Pilot — Rancher importing a handful of clusters + Fleet deploying to one staging cluster end-to-end, including a live rollback demo. (Gate before proceeding.) - Staging rollout — auto-sync templated across all staging clusters via labels. - Production promotion — ad-hoc gated promotion path to prod clusters. - Docs + Knowledge transfer. Must-have experience: - Rancher cluster management, including importing existing clusters - Rancher Fleet / Continuous Delivery across multiple clusters at scale - Kubernetes, Helm, GitOps workflows - Progressive rollout, health gates, and rollback strategies - Container image tagging/versioning best practices (immutable tags/digests) Nice to have: - AWS EKS; Keycloak/SSO integration with Rancher - Regulated/compliance-sensitive environments (audit trails, change control)