Platform & Infrastructure
Platform Engineer
Every other engineer in the company is, in a sense, a customer. Platform engineers build the internal tools, deployment pipelines, and abstractions that let product teams ship without rebuilding the same Kubernetes manifests from scratch.
The role is for people who get satisfaction from making other people's work easier — designing Terraform modules that hold up, CI workflows that fail loudly when they should, and golden paths developers actually want to follow. Students grow into platform engineering by deeply understanding the software development lifecycle, then learning the infrastructure underneath it.
Good platform engineers think in interfaces and treat developer experience as a product. The work is invisible when it goes right, which is much of the appeal.
- CodeIntermediateNew
Refactor a Tangled Terraform Repo for a Multi-Account AWS Estate
Working only from the materials provided — the de-identified repository snapshot, the account-and-region inventory, the plan-timing-and-drift readout, and the platform team's in…
- Terraform
- Terragrunt
- Infrastructure As Code
Open coursework - DesignIntermediateNew
Stand Up a Self-Service Developer Platform on Backstage
Read the company case file, the squad-and-service inventory, and the Platform v1 postmortem, and consult the official Backstage software-templates documentation for the mechanic…
- Internal Developer Platform
- Backstage
- Terraform
Open coursework - CodeIntermediateNew
Prove a gRPC Migration for a Kubernetes Control-Plane API
Examine three things: the captured control-plane traffic record (`traffic-7d`), the current REST API specification (`openapi-spec`), and the representative Go service module (`g…
- Grpc
- Protobuf
- API Design
Open coursework - CodeIntermediateNew
Stand Up a Backstage Developer Portal for a Frankfurt Fintech
Using the provided service inventory, ownership map, and rollout brief, build and deploy a Backstage portal on the company's existing Kubernetes platform and populate its catalo…
- Backstage
- Platform Engineering
- Service Catalog
Open coursework 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
Flatten the Datadog Bill for a Stockholm Gaming Studio
Working only from the materials provided, audit Stagelight Games' observability spend and produce a defensible plan to flatten it. Use the metric inventory export to rank the to…
- Cardinality Control
- Datadog
- Cost Optimization
Open coursework 
CodeIntermediateNewDrift-Detect and Self-Heal a Multi-Tenant Kubernetes Estate
Using the estate-case-file and the baseline-policy-spec, design a drift-detection and self-heal rollout for all 28 single-customer clusters built on ArgoCD continuous-sync (auto…
- Argocd
- Kyverno
- Drift Detection
Open coursework- DesignIntermediateNew
Design Schema Evolution for a Multi-Tenant Event Platform
Design a schema-evolution model covering: schema-registry topology (per-tenant subjects vs shared), compatibility modes per topic class (strict vs forward-only vs none), tenant-…
- Schema Evolution
- Kafka
- Schema Registry
Event-Driven Architecture - DesignIntermediateNew
Change-Impact Analysis for a Cross-Service API Migration
Pull API logs over 30 days from the API gateway to enumerate all consumers + per-endpoint call volume. Cross-reference with service-catalog ownership to map 23 consumers to team…
- Change Impact Analysis
- API Migration
- Parallel Run
Open coursework - 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.
- CodeIntermediateNew
Design a Multi-Tenant Kubernetes Namespace-Provisioning Self-Service
Design and build a Backstage scaffolder that lets a squad request a namespace (specifying environment, owners, expected scale). The scaffolder generates a pull request to a GitO…
- Platform Engineering
- Kubernetes
- Self Service
Platform Engineering - CodeSeniorNew
Build a Unikernel for a Privacy-Focused VPN Provider
Choose either MirageOS or Unikraft as the unikernel framework. Build an image running a minimal WireGuard data plane (existing OCaml or Rust WireGuard reference implementation i…
- Unikernels
- Virtualization
- Wireguard
Advanced Operating Systems - DesignBeginnerNew
Move an EdTech Platform's 4 Clusters to GitOps with ArgoCD
Using only the materials provided — the migration case file (incident_dossier), the service inventory dataset (service_inventory), and the platform team's target-state brief (ta…
- Argocd
- Kubernetes
- Kustomize
Open coursework - CodeIntermediateNew
Roll Out mTLS Across 80 Microservices with Istio
Install Istio (current LTS) in ambient mode where possible, sidecar mode where ambient is not yet supported by the service. Phase 1: enable PERMISSIVE mTLS namespace by namespac…
- Istio
- Mtls
- Kubernetes
Service Mesh and Microservices Networking 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
- AnalysisIntermediateNew
Choose the Right Tenant Containment Strategy for an Edge Platform
Working only from the provided materials, reach and defend a containment recommendation. Read the documented incident record (case-file) to understand what triggered the review …
- Containment
- Virtualization
- Wasm
Open coursework - DesignIntermediateNew
Design Multi-Tenant Network Policies with Calico Tier Enforcement
Receive the cluster topology (120 customer namespaces + 4 platform namespaces), the application traffic patterns (frontend talks to backend talks to its tenant's database), and …
- Kubernetes
- Network Policy
- Calico
Container Orchestration with Kubernetes - CodeIntermediateNew
Build a Custom Kubernetes Operator for a Multi-Tenant SaaS
Receive the current Helm + bash setup, a description of the per-tenant resources to manage, and the cluster details (EKS 1.29, Strimzi for Kafka). Design a TenantPipeline CRD wi…
- Kubernetes Operators
- Crds
- Kubebuilder
Container Orchestration with Kubernetes - CodeIntermediateNew
Ship an Engineering-Health Dashboard for an 18-Team Org
Using the four sample data extracts (pull-request events, Linear work-item history, PagerDuty incidents, and the quarterly developer-experience survey) and the organization brie…
- Software Analytics
- Dora Metrics
- Space Framework
Open coursework - CodeSeniorNew
Linkerd to Istio Migration for a Multi-Cluster Platform
Phase 1: install Istio alongside Linkerd in PERMISSIVE mode (Istio sidecars injected, Linkerd proxies remain). Phase 2: migrate non-critical namespaces first (4 namespaces) by r…
- Istio
- Linkerd
- Service Mesh
Service Mesh and Microservices Networking - DesignBeginnerNew
Design a Golden-Path Service Template for a Scaling SaaS Platform Team
Using the current-state assessment (provided), the platform team's golden-path requirements specification (provided), and the baseline deployment-metrics dataset (provided), des…
- Platform Engineering
- Golden Paths
- Backstage
Open coursework - DesignBeginnerNew
Design a 90-Day Cognitive-Load Reduction Plan for Six Squads
Using the cognitive-load self-assessment instrument, the squad tool-surface inventory, and the platform stakeholder brief provided to you, design a cognitive-load reduction prop…
- Platform Engineering
- Cognitive Load
- Team Topologies
Open coursework
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 →Platform & Infrastructure
Cloud Engineer
Cloud engineers are the reason a website still works when the marketing team forgets to warn them about a campaign. The role is part automation, part operations: writing Terraform that makes infrastructure reproducible, tuning Kubernetes clusters that actually behave under load, and building the unglamorous pipelines that let other engineers ship safely. Good work here looks like a system that recovers from failure faster than humans can notice it failed. Students grow into this path by getting comfortable with Linux, networking fundamentals, and the patient debugging that comes from chasing latency through five layers of abstraction. If you like the satisfaction of turning chaos into something predictable, this work compounds quickly.
Platform & Infrastructure
Database Administrator
Quietly, in the background of almost every digital service, sits a database that has to be fast, available, and not on fire at 3 a.m. The database administrator is the person responsible for that. DBAs tune queries, plan capacity, manage backups, and design migrations that move terabytes of information without losing a row. The role suits students who enjoy depth over breadth and find satisfaction in making complex systems behave. A good DBA can read an execution plan the way a mechanic reads an engine, and increasingly works across cloud platforms like AWS RDS and Azure SQL. You grow into it through deep SQL fluency, one specific database engine learned cold, and a calm temperament when production traffic spikes.
Platform & Infrastructure
DevOps Engineer
Between the code a developer writes and the service a customer uses lies a whole world of automation, and the devops engineer lives there. They build the pipelines that test and ship software safely, the infrastructure that scales when traffic spikes, and the alerting that catches problems before users do. The role suits students who like building tools that other engineers depend on. Days mix Terraform for infrastructure, Kubernetes for orchestration, and Bash for the glue between them. Strong devops engineers care about reliability the way good architects care about load-bearing walls. You grow into it through one cloud platform learned deeply, real fluency with Linux, and a temperament that treats incidents as puzzles rather than emergencies.
Platform & Infrastructure
Site Reliability Engineer
Pagers go off at 3 a.m. for a reason, and SREs exist so that reason is rarer and better understood. The discipline brings software engineering rigor to operations: Kubernetes clusters defined in Terraform, deployment pipelines written in Go or Python, capacity planning grounded in actual load tests rather than vibes. You'll learn to design systems that fail gracefully and to write runbooks that someone half-asleep can follow. Strong SREs are honest about error budgets and resist the temptation to treat every incident as exceptional. Students who enjoyed both their algorithms course and their first Linux deep-dive often find a home here. Growth comes through owning real services, leading blameless post-mortems, and earning trust from developers as a partner rather than a gatekeeper.
Platform & Infrastructure
Systems Architect
Systems architects make the decisions whose consequences are felt for years. The role is about choosing: which cloud provider, which integration pattern, which trade-off between cost and reliability deserves an Architecture Decision Record so the next team understands the reasoning. You'll work in C4 diagrams, ArchiMate models, and the AWS or Azure Well-Architected Framework, but the real artifact is clarity of thought. Strong architects know when to standardize and when to let a team diverge, and they write documents that survive a leadership change. Students drawn here usually loved their distributed systems course and are patient enough to think before they build. Growth happens through scars: owning architectures end-to-end, watching them strain under real load, and learning which abstractions earned their place.
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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 Danny Postma on Unsplash.