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.
- DesignIntermediateNew
Design SLO-Driven Alerts for a Telco's Subscriber API
Receive a 90-day RED (Rate, Errors, Duration) metrics export for the subscriber API across 6 endpoints and 38 weeks of paging history. Define an SLO per endpoint (e.g., 99.9 per…
- Slo Design
- Alerting
- Prometheus & Grafana
Software Observability - CodeIntermediateNew
Canary Deployments via Mesh Traffic Splitting for a Streaming Platform
Set up Flagger with Istio as the traffic provider. Define a canary policy for the playback-API service: 5 percent → 25 percent → 50 percent → 100 percent with 5-minute bake at e…
- Istio
- Flagger
- Canary Deployment
Service Mesh and Microservices Networking - AnalysisIntermediateNew
TCP Congestion Control Comparison on a Long-Fat Network
Set up two Linux test hosts in Sydney + Frankfurt cloud regions (or one host pair with tc-netem emulating 280ms RTT). Run iperf3 transfers using CUBIC and BBR at 4 loss rates (0…
- Tcp Ip
- Congestion Control
- Performance Testing
Computer Networks - AnalysisIntermediateNew
Debug Latency Tail With Distributed Tracing on a Logistics SaaS
Receive 7 days of anonymized trace data in Tempo, the service map (12 services), and the customer complaint log. Investigate: filter the slowest 1 percent of traces, identify th…
- Distributed Tracing
- Performance Analysis
- Tempo
Software Observability 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
- StrategyIntermediateNew
Design a Multi-Region Blue/Green Database Deployment for an EdTech Platform
Design the migration: source PostgreSQL 14 (primary in São Paulo) to target PostgreSQL 16 (primary in Mexico City, replica in Bogotá). Use logical replication for zero-downtime …
- Blue Green Deployment
- Logical Replication
- Postgresql Or Mysql
DevOps and Secure Deployment - AnalysisIntermediateNew
Capacity Planning Model for a Black-Friday Traffic Surge
Pull 18 months of per-service request rate + utilization from Prometheus. Forecast BFCM traffic per service using a baseline + multiplicative seasonal model (Prophet or statsmod…
- Capacity Planning
- Forecasting
- Autoscaling
Site Reliability Engineering - CodeIntermediateNew
Instrument Network Telemetry for an ISP's Backbone
Receive the backbone topology (12 routers across 4 PoPs, mix of Cisco IOS XR + Juniper Junos), the current SNMP-based monitoring stack, and 4 weeks of customer-complaint tickets…
- Network Telemetry
- Gnmi
- Kafka Event Streaming
Advanced Computer Networks - AnalysisIntermediateNew
Diagnose Modern Transport-Protocol Performance for an OTT Streamer
Receive the current delivery architecture (HTTP/2 origin + CDN), 4 weeks of Conviva-style QoE (quality of experience) metrics, and access to a synthetic-client harness (Linux + …
- Quic Http3
- Network Measurement
- Transport Protocols
Advanced Computer Networks - 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.
- DesignIntermediateNew
Observability for a Microservices Payments Platform
Design the observability architecture: OpenTelemetry traces from 38 services into Tempo, structured logs via Loki, RED (rate, errors, duration) metrics via Prometheus, SLOs defi…
- Observability
- Opentelemetry Instrumentation
- Slo Design
DevOps and Secure Deployment - CodeIntermediateNew
Roll Out OpenTelemetry Tracing Across a Microservices Fintech
Receive an anonymized service map (90 services, payment-critical path of 12), a runtime mix (Node.js, Go, Java), and existing logging/metrics setup. Define: an OTel SDK adoption…
- Distributed Tracing
- Opentelemetry Instrumentation
- Sampling Strategies
Software Observability - AnalysisIntermediateNew
Randomized Load Balancer with the Power of Two Choices
Simulate four placement policies on a 24-hour anonymized connection-establishment trace (around 4.1 billion events): (1) random-1, (2) round-robin, (3) P2C with instantaneous lo…
- Power Of Two Choices
- Load Balancing
- Randomized Algorithms
Randomized Algorithms
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
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.
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.
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 Ehsan Ahmadi on Unsplash.