Stand Up a Backstage Developer Portal for a Frankfurt Fintech
Overview
What this challenge is about.
Build a Backstage portal on Kubernetes, write catalog generators, configure TechDocs, and add a scorecard. Earn your verifiable certificate.
The scenario
The company sells banking-as-a-service infrastructure (accounts, payments, cards, compliance) that consumer neobanks build their apps on top of, so an outage or an unowned service directly affects other companies' customers. After years of fast team growth, ownership and on-call knowledge live in people's heads and scattered wikis rather than one queryable source.
The Brief
What you'll do, and what you'll demonstrate.
Engineers cannot reliably answer who owns a service, who is on call for it, or where its documentation lives, because there is no single source of truth across 380 services and 32 teams.
Earning criteria — what you'll demonstrate
- Deploy and configure Backstage on Kubernetes as a production internal developer portal
- Generate a service catalog programmatically from existing inventory and ownership data so it stays in sync automatically
- Configure docs-as-code (TechDocs) and a scorecard that scores real signals from the catalog
- Define and measure developer-portal adoption with metrics that reflect genuine usage rather than vanity numbers
- Package a platform rollout as a self-service playbook that scales beyond the pilot
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.
- Backstage
Apply backstage to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Platform Engineering
Apply platform engineering to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Service Catalog
Apply service catalog to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Developer Experience
Apply developer experience to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Kubernetes
Apply kubernetes to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Observability
Apply observability 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
Standing up Backstage, automating catalog ingestion, and running a measured pilot mirrors the day-to-day work of building internal platforms that the rest of engineering relies on, from deployment to adoption tracking.
This challenge sharpens
- backstage
- platform-engineering
- kubernetes
Developer Experience Engineer
Designing a self-service portal, measuring genuine adoption, and writing an onboarding playbook are exactly how DevEx engineers reduce friction and prove that internal tooling actually changes how engineers work.
This challenge sharpens
- developer-experience
- service-catalog
- backstage
Site Reliability Engineer
Building a trustworthy source of ownership, on-call, and service-health signals is foundational SRE work; the scorecard and observability metrics here translate directly into incident-readiness and reliability practices.
This challenge sharpens
- observability
- service-catalog
- platform-engineering