Security
Security Engineer
If a security analyst watches for fires, a security engineer builds the systems that make fires harder to start. The work is architectural: designing Zero Trust networks, hardening CI/CD pipelines against supply chain attacks, choosing cryptographic primitives that won't be regretted in five years.
You hold an adversarial mindset in one hand and an empathy for developer workflow in the other, because controls that engineers route around aren't really controls. Frameworks like OWASP and the MITRE ATT&CK catalog give you a shared language with the rest of the field.
Students drawn to this path usually liked the puzzles in a CTF more than the prizes. Growth comes from owning a real production environment and writing the post-mortem when something you missed went wrong.
Skills you'll need
- DesignBeginnerNew
Vendor-Security Review Program for a Series-C SaaS
Design a 3-tier TPRM framework (critical / important / low-risk) with explicit classification criteria (data type, integration depth, downtime impact, regulatory scope). For eac…
- Third Party Risk
- Security Governance
- Compliance
Information Security Management and Governance - DesignIntermediateNew
Detection Engineering for Cloud DDoS Against a Public-Sector Portal
Receive sanitized logs from the 2 prior incidents (CloudFront, ALB, WAF) and the current AWS architecture. Design: 6 Sigma detection rules (mix L7 floods, slow-POST, low-rate di…
- Ddos Defense
- Detection Engineering
- Waf
Network Security - DesignIntermediateNew
Design a Secure Wi-Fi Onboarding Flow for IoT Devices
Design a BLE-based onboarding protocol: device advertises a service UUID on power-on, the companion app discovers, performs an ECDH key exchange, then encrypts and sends Wi-Fi S…
- Link Layer Protocols
- Ble
- Secure Onboarding
Computer Networks - DesignIntermediateNew
Threat Model a HealthTech Patient-Portal Web App
Read the 25-page redesign architecture document (auth via Clerk, Next.js front-end, FastAPI backend, Postgres, S3 for documents, webhook integration with EMRs). Build data-flow …
- Threat Modeling
- STRIDE
- Secure Design
Software Security 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
- DesignIntermediateNew
Author an Incident Response Playbook for a Fintech Startup
Author a 4-phase playbook (Prepare, Detect & Analyze, Contain/Eradicate/Recover, Post-Incident) covering 6 incident classes: data breach, ransomware, account takeover, payment-f…
- Incident Response
- NIST Sp 800 61
- Security Governance
Information Security Management and Governance - DesignSeniorNew
Design an End-to-End Encrypted Messaging Protocol
Read the Signal protocol specifications (X3DH, Double Ratchet) and the team's current architecture (server-stored unencrypted messages). Design an E2EE protocol covering: identi…
- Applied Cryptography
- Protocol Design
- Systems Language Proficiency (Go, Rust, C++)
Applied Cryptography - DesignIntermediateNew
Intrusion Detection at the Edge for a Tier-1 Auto Supplier's OT Network
Receive an anonymized network diagram for 1 plant, sample pcap (packet capture) traffic of Modbus + OPC UA + PROFINET flows, and a list of 10 known OT attack scenarios from MITR…
- Intrusion Detection
- Ot Security
- Zeek
Network Security - DesignBeginnerNew
Design Secrets Management for a Regulated GitOps Pipeline
Design the secrets topology: Vault as the single source, External Secrets Operator (ESO) syncing into Kubernetes Secrets with auto-rotation. SecretStore + ClusterSecretStore bou…
- External Secrets Operator
- Hashicorp Vault
- Secrets Management
GitOps and Continuous Delivery - 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.
- DesignSeniorNew
Design an OS-Level Side-Channel Mitigation for a Multi-Tenant Cloud
Read 3 canonical cache-side-channel papers (provided). For each attack: characterize the threat model, the required attacker capabilities, and the OS-level invariant that, if he…
- Os Security
- Side Channels
- Virtualization
Advanced Operating Systems - DesignIntermediateNew
Authentication + RBAC for a Multi-Workspace SaaS
Design the auth architecture: identity provider (managed), session model (JWT with rotation), workspace-membership claims, RBAC permission model (4 default roles, custom-role ca…
- Authentication
- Rbac
- Sso
Engineering Software as a Service
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.
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 amin naderloei on Unsplash.