Software Engineering
Backend Engineer
Behind every app a user touches, there's a quieter system doing the actual work — routing requests, holding state, refusing bad input politely. Backend engineers build and care for that hidden layer.
The role is part craft, part diplomacy: you're designing APIs that other engineers will lean on for years, and a careless schema choice can echo through a company for a long time. Good work here looks like code that's boring in the best way — predictable under load, easy for the next person to read, observable when something breaks.
Students grow into this role by getting comfortable with Python or another server language, then learning how databases really behave when traffic spikes.
- CodeBeginnerNew
Diagnose and Fix a Deadlock in a Multi-Threaded Payments Service
Receive the service source (Java 21 + Spring Boot, around 30,000 lines), 4 thread dumps from production deadlocks, and a load harness that reproduces the bug roughly 1 in 50 run…
- Deadlock Analysis
- Locks And Monitors
- Python Or Javascript
Concurrent and Parallel Programming - CodeBeginnerNew
Build a Bounded Concurrent Queue for a Microservice Worker Pool
Implement a bounded concurrent queue in Go (no third-party queue libraries; standard library + sync primitives only) that supports: Put(item) blocks when full, TryPut(item, time…
- Concurrent Data Structures
- Mutex And Condvar
- Systems Language Proficiency (Go, Rust, C++)
Concurrent and Parallel Programming - AnalysisBeginnerNew
Pick a NoSQL Store for an Event-Stream Sidecar Cache
Set up identical 3-node clusters of Redis 7, KeyDB, and DragonflyDB on equivalent hardware. Run the team's captured 24-hour workload trace (around 180k ops/second, 80/20 read/wr…
- Nosql
- Redis
- Benchmarking
Introduction to Database Systems - AnalysisBeginnerNew
Choose a Hash Table vs Trie for a URL-Shortener Cache
Implement (1) a hash-table cache with linear probing and (2) a compressed trie cache, both with the same eviction policy (LRU). Measure (a) p50/p99 lookup latency, (b) memory fo…
- Hash Tables
- Trie Data Structure
- Benchmarking
Data Structures Practice your coursework on real scenarios.
Every challenge is shaped from real-world context — not generic exercises. The work mirrors what your degree prepares you for.
Why Ewance
- AnalysisBeginnerNew
Profile and Optimize a Virtual-Memory-Heavy Image Pipeline
Receive the Go pipeline source, a representative batch (1,200 photos averaging 12MB each, with 30 outliers over 80MB), and host specs (4-core, 16GB RAM, Linux kernel 5.15). Run …
- Virtual Memory
- Performance Profiling
- Memory Hierarchy
Computer Systems and Organization - CodeBeginnerNew
Build an Embedding-Based Semantic Search for a Legal-Document Corpus
Embed the 380k-document corpus using a multilingual sentence-transformer (e.g. multilingual MPNet or LaBSE). Store embeddings in FAISS or pgvector. Build a search service that r…
- Deep Learning
- Ml Applications
- Python Or Javascript
Machine Learning (CS Elective) - CodeBeginnerNew
Knowledge-Graph Recommender for a Niche Online Bookstore
Model the catalog as a knowledge graph (nodes: books, authors, genres, themes, eras, awards; edges: wrote, in-genre, has-theme, won, similar-to). Use Neo4j or a simple Python in…
- Knowledge Representation
- Knowledge Graphs
- Python Or Javascript
Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (CS Elective) - CodeBeginnerNew
Refactor a Node.js Service into Scala with Effect Systems
Take the existing Node.js price-normalization code (provided). Rewrite in Scala 3 using ZIO (or Cats Effect) — model every effect explicitly (IO for side effects, Either or type…
- Scala Programming
- Zio Effects
- Cats Effect
Functional Programming - Browse challenges
Explore role
Product Manager
Ship product that solves real user problems. Combine user research, prototyping, and stakeholder alignment to turn ambiguous briefs into measurable wins — the role at the centre of modern software teams.
- CodeBeginnerNew
Design a Race-Free Cache for a Read-Heavy Service
Implement a thread-safe LRU-bounded cache in Java (or Go — your choice, defend it) with: read-write lock or copy-on-write semantics, get-or-load pattern with single-flight to de…
- Concurrent Data Structures
- Race Conditions
- Single Flight
Concurrent and Parallel Programming - CodeBeginnerNew
Structured Logging Migration for a Healthcare SaaS Monolith
Receive the current Lograge-flavored Rails logger and 3 sample log files (anonymized PHI). Design: a structured-log JSON schema (request_id, user_id, route, status, duration_ms,…
- Structured Logging
- Loki
- Phi Redaction
Software Observability - CodeBeginnerNew
Build a Reliable Transport Layer Over UDP
Implement in Go: connection establishment (3-way handshake), sequenced and acknowledged data segments, retransmission timer with exponential backoff, fast retransmit on triple d…
- Tcp Ip
- Reliable Transport
- Udp
Computer Networks - AnalysisBeginnerNew
Developer-Experience Audit of a Public API
Walk through the existing public API as a first-time developer using only the public docs, OpenAPI spec, SDKs (Python + JavaScript), and example repos. Run the first-hour test 3…
- Developer Experience
- REST API Design
- Audit Grade Documentation
API Design and GraphQL Build a verifiable portfolio.
Submissions become evidence. Reviewers with shipping experience score against a rubric; the result becomes a credential anyone can verify.
Why Ewance
- CodeBeginnerNew
Implement Authentication and Access Control for a Civic Portal
Receive the current Next.js + Express prototype, the data model (residents, requests, documents, audit log), and the 4 staff roles (resident, clerk, supervisor, auditor) with th…
- Authentication
- Authorization
- Rbac
Introduction to Computer Security - AnalysisBeginnerNew
Customer-Segmentation Study for a DTC Subscription Box
Use 18 months of anonymized data: order history, churn events, NPS responses, box-rating data, referral activity, marketing-channel attribution. Engineer features (RFM-style + b…
- Unsupervised Learning
- Python Or Javascript
- Ml Applications
Machine Learning (CS Elective) - CodeBeginnerNew
Churn-Prediction Model for a B2B Vertical SaaS
Use 18 months of anonymized data (provided) covering: usage events, login frequency, support tickets, NPS responses, billing health, feature adoption, practice firmographics. De…
- Supervised Learning
- Python Or Javascript
- Ml Applications
Machine Learning (CS Elective)
How it works
From brief to credential, in six steps.
Step 01
Browse challenges aligned to your studies.
Step 02
Accept the one that fits your goals.
Step 03
Work through it with AI Copilot guidance.
Step 04
Submit for structured evaluation.
Step 05
Earn a verified credential.
Step 06
Add it to LinkedIn with one click.
Related roles you may want to explore
Browse all roles →Software Engineering
Frontend Engineer
Every button a user clicks, every loading state they wait through, every form that almost-but-not-quite works, all of it passed through a frontend engineer's editor. This is the discipline that decides how software feels. The role lives at a peculiar intersection of design empathy, performance budgets, and accessibility standards, which is why students who like both visual craft and systems thinking often find a home here. You'd grow into it by building real things in React or Next.js, reading other people's code, and developing taste for what feels right. Tools like GitHub Copilot accelerate the typing; the judgement about when to refactor and when to ship is still yours. Strong frontend engineers care that a screen reader can navigate their work.
Software Engineering
Full-Stack Engineer
Picture the small startup team where one engineer ships a feature from the database schema to the deployed button. That generalist mindset is what the full-stack engineer brings, even at larger companies. The role exists because most useful software doesn't respect the boundary between client and server, and someone needs to reason about both. Students grow into this by being curious past their comfort zone, picking up PostgreSQL when they came for React, learning OAuth flows when they came for UI. The work rewards people who'd rather understand a whole system than perfect one slice of it. Strong full-stack engineers know when to ask a specialist for help, which is itself a skill worth developing early.
Software Engineering
Mobile Engineer
Open the app on your phone and tap something. The fact that it responded instantly, didn't drain your battery, and worked on a five-year-old device is not an accident — a mobile engineer obsessed over that. This role is for people who care about craft at the interface where software meets a human's pocket. Expect days writing native code against the Android SDK or iOS, profiling animations, fighting flaky tests, and shepherding releases through App Store Connect. Students grow into it by shipping their own small app and feeling the gap between a demo and something a stranger would actually use. Strong mobile engineers treat accessibility as a baseline, not a feature.
Software Engineering
Software Engineer
US$163,883
Software engineers turn intent into code that other people rely on, often without ever meeting them. The craft is broader than the languages — Python, Go, Java rotate in and out of fashion — and centers on judgment: which abstraction to introduce, which test to write first, which review comment matters and which is taste dressed up as principle. AI tools like Copilot and Claude Code accelerate the typing but raise the bar on knowing what to build. Strong engineers care about the people who'll maintain their code in two years, including their future selves. Students drawn to this path often started building things in high school and never stopped. Growth comes from shipping real systems, taking ownership when they break, and reading code written by people better than you.
Industry teams behind a decade of practitioner briefs
Hiring from this pool?
Sponsor a challenge and meet candidates through actual work.
Industry teams can shape briefs around the skills they hire for, then evaluate students on rubric-scored deliverables — not resumes.
Skills and disciplines shown on this page are derived from the Ewance challenge catalogue. When the median annual salary is available for this role via Adzuna, it will be shown above with the sample size and country.
Portrait: Photo by Muhammad Numan on Unsplash.