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.
- StrategyBeginnerNew
Toil Audit + Automation Sprint for a Platform Team
Week 1-2: every team member logs every toil instance for 10 working days (timestamp, category, duration). Categorize using the Google SRE toil taxonomy (manual, repetitive, auto…
- Toil Reduction
- Automation
- Reliability Engineering
Site Reliability Engineering - AnalysisBeginnerNew
Define SLOs and Error Budgets for a Real-Time Trading API
Pull 90 days of API latency + error data per endpoint from Prometheus (anonymized exports provided). Propose Service Level Indicators (SLIs) for 3 services × 2 SLI types (availa…
- Slo / Sli Definition
- Error Budgets
- Sli Design
Site Reliability Engineering - PresentationBeginnerNew
Run an Incident-Response Tabletop for a Healthtech On-Call Team
Design 3 tabletop scenarios with realistic timeline injects (every 5-10 minutes, new info arrives). Run the tabletop hybrid (in-person + remote) with the 8 on-call engineers + 2…
- Incident Response
- Tabletop Exercises
- Incident Command
Site Reliability Engineering - CodeBeginnerNew
Implement Progressive Delivery with Flagger for an E-Commerce Backend
Install Flagger (or Argo Rollouts) into the existing Kubernetes + Istio stack. Configure canary analysis using Prometheus metrics: request-success-rate, request-duration p99, an…
- Flagger
- Argo Rollouts
- Canary Deployment
GitOps and Continuous Delivery 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
- CodeBeginnerNew
Build an I/O Benchmarking Harness for an Edge Storage Appliance
Receive the appliance specs (4x 7.68TB Gen4 NVMe, ZFS, Linux kernel 5.15), the 3 target workload profiles (4KB random read at QD32, 1MB sequential write at QD8, mixed 70/30 read…
- Io Benchmarking
- Fio
- System Calls
Computer Systems and Organization - AnalysisBeginnerNew
Postmortem and Action-Item Tracking for a 3-Service Outage
Re-write the existing postmortem using the Google SRE blameless format: timeline (anchored to UTC), what went well, what went poorly, where we got lucky, action items (S.M.A.R.T…
- Postmortems
- Blameless Culture
- Action Item Tracking
Site Reliability Engineering - CodeBeginnerNew
Observability Injection: Distributed Tracing via Sidecars
Enable Envoy tracing with the OpenTelemetry tracer in Istio MeshConfig. Configure a Tempo backend with a Grafana frontend. Verify W3C tracecontext propagation across all 26 serv…
- Distributed Tracing
- Opentelemetry Instrumentation
- API Gateway Patterns (Kong, Envoy)
Service Mesh and Microservices Networking
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.