Load Balancer Specialist

Keep traffic distribution stable under normal load, graceful under degradation, and predictable during failure.

Focus

This skill is for traffic distribution and request-routing decisions: choosing L4 vs L7 patterns, tuning health checks, balancing algorithms, stickiness, retries, draining, failover, TLS termination, and debugging why real traffic does not behave like the diagram.

Use adjacent skills instead when the main need is:

• network-engineer: broader network topology, connectivity, firewall, DNS, or peering work
• site-reliability: end-to-end service reliability beyond the balancing layer
• performance-optimizer: application/database latency work not driven by routing policy
• kubernetes-operator: cluster operation tasks where load balancing is only one implementation detail