Engineering & IT
Cloud Architect
The cloud architect is the person who decides, before a single line of code runs, what the shape of a system will be. Which regions, which services, which boundaries, which failure modes the company is willing to live with.
The role pulls on AWS and Azure not as products to memorize but as a vocabulary for tradeoffs — cost, latency, resilience, security, blast radius. Good work here looks like an architecture diagram a junior engineer can implement and a CFO can sign off on.
Students grow into this path by building real things on a cloud account, breaking them, fixing them, and learning to defend design choices against the Well-Architected questions a senior reviewer will ask.
Architecture trade-offs across security, cost, latency, and compliance involve so many constraints AI can suggest but a human owns the call and the consequences.
US$142,563 median salary in United States¹
Skills you'll need
- CodeIntermediateNew
Integer Programming for Cloud Resource Allocation
Your task is to formulate an integer programming model to select the number of reserved instances (each type: compute, memory, storage) and allocate on-demand instances monthly.…
- Integer Programming
- Python Or Javascript
- Pulp
Operations Research and Optimization - DesignIntermediateNew
Cloud Architecture Design for a Multi-Tenant SaaS Platform
Deliver a comprehensive cloud architecture design covering: (1) Multi-tenancy strategy (shared database with row-level security vs. schema-per-tenant vs. database-per-tenant — j…
- Cloud Computing
- It Security
- Web Development
Open coursework - StrategyIntermediateNew
Migrating a 40-Person SaaS Scale-Up to Cloud-Native Architecture
You are to create a detailed migration plan for TaskFlow. The plan must include breaking the monolith into at least 4 microservices, containerizing them with Docker, orchestrati…
- Microservices Patterns
- Docker
- Kubernetes Orchestration
Big Data and Cloud Technologies
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.
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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.
¹ Median annual salary computed from the salary histogram of 50 current Adzuna job postings for "Cloud Architect" in United States, fetched May 2026. Skills come from the disciplines tagged on live Ewance challenges for this role.
Portrait: Photo by Brock Wegner on Unsplash.