Design a Golden-Path Service Template for a Scaling SaaS Platform Team
Overview
What this challenge is about.
Design a golden-path service template with tracing, logging, and a self-service scaffolder. Justify your defaults and earn a verifiable certificate.
The scenario
The company is a Series-D business-to-business software-as-a-service scale-up whose sales-engagement product is built by nine autonomous product squads, and its platform team owns the shared developer tooling that those squads build on.
The Brief
What you'll do, and what you'll demonstrate.
Design a golden-path service template that takes a new microservice from scaffolding to production in under 30 minutes with consistent monitoring and an automated build pipeline.
Earning criteria — what you'll demonstrate
- Translate evidence of inconsistent engineering practice into a concrete set of opinionated, defensible defaults
- Design a self-service service template that is production-ready out of the box, including monitoring and an automated build pipeline
- Define measurable developer-experience outcomes and a pilot that can validate them against a real baseline
- Make and communicate a rollout decision that weighs feasibility, risk, and adoption sequencing for multiple teams
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.
- Platform Engineering
Apply platform engineering to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Golden Paths
Apply golden paths to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Backstage
Apply backstage 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
This challenge mirrors the core platform mandate: turning inconsistent team practices into a paved road that ships production-ready services fast. You practice designing opinionated defaults, packaging them for Kubernetes, and proving the value with a measured pilot.
This challenge sharpens
- platform-engineering
- golden-paths
- kubernetes
Developer Experience Engineer
You design self-service tooling around a real adoption metric, instrument it, and measure how it changes time-to-deploy and satisfaction — the exact loop a developer-experience role runs to lower friction for engineering teams.
This challenge sharpens
- developer-experience
- backstage
- golden-paths
Site Reliability Engineer
By making tracing and metrics on-by-default and validating them end-to-end, you build the observability foundation reliability teams depend on, and you reason about safe, sequenced rollout across many services and squads.
This challenge sharpens
- observability
- kubernetes
- platform-engineering