This is how I would go about this is in a crude way, see if it makes sense to you.
All we're looking to do is boot up a pod and supply some parameters to it to conduct the match.
So, let's say the player(s) hits on start match, you make an API call to boot the pod up. The environment variables can be the list of players playing the match. When the match ends, you make another API call to shut the container down. I do not quite understand why you would need a job for this to schedule terminating and booting of pods.
Siddarthan Sarumathi Pandian
Full Stack Dev at Agentdesks | Ex Hashnode | Ex Shippable | Ex Altair Engineering