Overview
What this challenge is about.
Build three GitOps self-service templates for a fintech platform’s Backstage scaffolder, then earn your verifiable certificate.
The scenario
The company is a mid-size Swedish financial-technology firm whose 18 engineering squads ship payment and lending services under regulatory scrutiny, but where all infrastructure provisioning currently funnels through a single overloaded central team via tickets.
The Brief
What you'll do, and what you'll demonstrate.
Decide how to build a Backstage-based self-service platform — its templates, its pilot, and its rollout — that lets 18 squads provision standardized infrastructure without central tickets, while avoiding the pitfalls that sank the company's first attempt.
Earning criteria — what you'll demonstrate
- Translate organizational provisioning pain into concrete internal-developer-platform design decisions.
- Design Backstage software templates that produce safe, standardized infrastructure through the scaffolder and a GitOps workflow.
- Use operational data to scope and de-risk a phased platform rollout across many teams.
- Diagnose why a prior platform initiative failed and engineer specific mitigations into a new plan.
- Communicate platform architecture and trade-offs clearly enough for a technical leadership sign-off.
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.
- Internal Developer Platform
Apply internal developer platform to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Backstage
Apply backstage to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Terraform
Apply terraform to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Gitops
Apply gitops to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Kubernetes
Apply kubernetes to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Documentation
Apply documentation to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
Careers
Career paths this challenge builds toward
Completing this challenge demonstrates skills that transfer directly to these roles:
Platform Engineer
Mirrors the core of the role: turning fragmented, ticket-driven provisioning into a paved self-service platform. You leave able to design Backstage templates, wire them to infrastructure code, and defend the architecture to engineering leadership.
This challenge sharpens
- internal-developer-platform
- backstage
- terraform
Developer Experience Engineer
Developer-experience work lives or dies on adoption. Choosing a pilot from real squad data and sequencing a rollout that respects team autonomy is exactly how a developer-experience engineer earns trust and drives golden-path uptake across an organization.
This challenge sharpens
- internal-developer-platform
- documentation
- backstage
Site Reliability / GitOps Engineer
The end-to-end GitOps path — scaffolder to infrastructure code to a reconciling agent on Kubernetes — is the daily reality of reliability engineering. This challenge builds the judgment to make that pipeline safe, observable, and repeatable.
This challenge sharpens
- gitops
- kubernetes
- terraform