Build a Scalable-System-Design Spec for a Streaming-Ingest Pipeline

FreeVerified credential4 weeksAdvanced

Overview

What this challenge is about.

Build a Scalable-System-Design Spec for a Streaming-Ingest Pipeline. Advanced challenge in design. Designing real products under real constraints, earn a blo...

CredentialBlockchain-anchored

ShareableLinkedIn-ready

LanguageEnglish

PaceSelf-paced

The Brief

What you'll do, and what you'll demonstrate.

Produce a scalable-system-design spec to grow a streaming-ingest pipeline from 80k to 1M events/sec, with a prototype that validates the capacity model on the bottleneck component.

This is not a design exercise. It is the work a product designer does between a brief and a shipped interface. That distinction matters to every hiring manager who has seen candidates redesign Spotify's homepage and none who have worked under real product constraints.

When you finish, you will have something most graduates do not: a real-world deliverable, verified by Ewance, that you can show to a hiring manager and say "I did this. Here is the proof."

Earning criteria — what you'll demonstrate

Build a defensible capacity model for a streaming pipeline
Pick partitioning and hot-key strategies under real skew
Define operational SLOs that map to customer impact
Validate a capacity model with a focused prototype, not a full rebuild

Program Fit

Where this fits in your program.

Sharpens the same skills your degree expects you to demonstrate.

Aligned coursework coming soon.

Skills

Skills you'll demonstrate.

Each one shows up on your verified credential.

Careers

Career paths this challenge builds toward

Completing this challenge demonstrates skills that transfer directly to these roles:

Career paths this builds toward

Canonical roles

Systems Architect
Systems architects make the decisions whose consequences are felt for years. The role is about choosing: which cloud provider, which integration pattern, which trade-off between cost and reliability deserves an Architecture Decision Record so the next team understands the reasoning. You'll work in C4 diagrams, ArchiMate models, and the AWS or Azure Well-Architected Framework, but the real artifact is clarity of thought. Strong architects know when to standardize and when to let a team diverge, and they write documents that survive a leadership change. Students drawn here usually loved their distributed systems course and are patient enough to think before they build. Growth happens through scars: owning architectures end-to-end, watching them strain under real load, and learning which abstractions earned their place.
Platform & Infrastructure

One more thing

You can put a credential on your CV by Friday.

Start this challenge