Software Engineering
Software Engineer
Software engineers turn intent into code that other people rely on, often without ever meeting them. The craft is broader than the languages — Python, Go, Java rotate in and out of fashion — and centers on judgment: which abstraction to introduce, which test to write first, which review comment matters and which is taste dressed up as principle.
AI tools like Copilot and Claude Code accelerate the typing but raise the bar on knowing what to build. Strong engineers care about the people who'll maintain their code in two years, including their future selves.
Students drawn to this path often started building things in high school and never stopped. Growth comes from shipping real systems, taking ownership when they break, and reading code written by people better than you.
US$163,883 median salary in United States¹
- CodeIntermediateNew
Build a Hybrid Recommendation System for an Indie Streaming Catalog
Use the provided 6-month anonymized event log (around 320M play events, 1.4M unique users in the held-out cohort), audio embeddings (256-d), and track metadata. Implement (1) an…
- Recommendation Systems
- Collaborative Filtering
- Content Based Recommendation
Data Mining and Information Retrieval - CodeBeginnerNew
Refactor a Legacy Reporting Script for a Renewable-Energy Startup
Read the existing script and identify 5-7 distinct responsibilities tangled together. Refactor into 3 layers: data loaders (CSV, REST API), transformers (pure functions over row…
- Abstraction
- Higher Order Functions
- Refactoring
Programming Abstractions - CodeSeniorNew
Design an In-House Bare-Metal Bootloader for a Smartwatch Prototype
Working only from the provided materials, design and implement a bare-metal C bootloader for the Cortex-M4 target with no operating system, a custom linker script, and vector-ta…
- C Programming
- Manual Memory Management
- Pointers
Open coursework - AnalysisSeniorNew
Diagnose Clock Skew in a HFT Order Matching System
Receive anonymized PTP grandmaster + slave logs (nanosecond resolution, 30 days, 3 cabinets) plus a synthetic order-flow generator. Identify the drift pattern (likely candidate:…
- Logical Clocks
- Ptp Time Sync
- Cpp Programming
Distributed Systems 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
- AnalysisIntermediateNew
ODE Integrator Benchmark for a Pharma PK/PD Pipeline
Use SciPy's solve_ivp + SUNDIALS (via scikit-sundae or diffeqpy) to benchmark: RK45 (baseline), LSODA, BDF (CVODE), Radau, and Rosenbrock. Run on three model classes (insulin-gl…
- Numerical Odes
- Stiff Integrators
- Scientific Python
Scientific Computing and Numerical Methods - CodeIntermediateNew
Design Error Recovery for a Friendly Compiler
Read the existing parser (recursive-descent, in Rust). Design and implement a panic-mode error recovery strategy with synchronization tokens (statement boundary, end of block, s…
- Error Recovery
- Recursive Descent Parsing
- Diagnostic Design
Compiler Construction - DesignBeginnerNew
Design a Lexer and Parser for a Customer Query Language
Using the grammar sketch, the query corpus sample, the Abstract Syntax Tree schema, and the edge-case suite provided to you, write a design proposal for a new lexer and parser t…
- Lexing
- Recursive Descent Parsing
- Abstract Syntax Trees
Open coursework - CodeSeniorNew
Scale an HPC MPI Workload Across a Multi-Node Cluster
Receive the MPI weather model (Fortran 2018 + C, ~22,000 lines), 4 weeks of strong-scaling logs (1 to 256 ranks), and access to AWS ParallelCluster with EFA-enabled c7gn instanc…
- Hpc Programming
- Mpi
- Parallel Performance
Advanced Concurrency and Parallel Computing - 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
Build a 5-Stage Pipelined RISC-V Core in Verilog
Implement the 5-stage pipeline with: hazard detection unit, forwarding paths (EX/MEM to EX, MEM/WB to EX), pipeline stalls for load-use hazards, and a simple static branch-not-t…
- Pipelining
- Hazard Detection
- Verilog
Computer Architecture - CodeIntermediateNew
Apply Software Transactional Memory to a Real-Time Auction Book
Implement two variants of the same auction-book API (best-bid/best-ask lookup, place-order, cancel-order, match-orders): (1) baseline with java.util.concurrent locks + a SkipLis…
- Transactional Memory
- Concurrent Data Structures
- Haskell
Advanced Concurrency and Parallel Computing - CodeBeginnerNew
Apply Property-Based Testing to a Currency-Conversion Module
Rewrite the conversion module in F#: use units of measure for currency types, immutable value types for amounts, no floating-point arithmetic (Decimal only). Build property test…
- Fsharp
- Property Based Testing
- Fscheck
Functional Programming - AnalysisBeginnerNew
Diagnose a Deadlock in a Multi-Threaded File Indexer
Clone the indexer repo (provided), set up reproduction with thread-sanitizer and helgrind, and produce a deterministic deadlock test case in under 5 minutes of runtime. Diagnose…
- Synchronization
- Deadlock Analysis
- C Programming
Operating Systems 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
- CodeBeginnerNew
Build a Source-to-Source Migration Tool for a Legacy API
Use Python's libcst (concrete syntax tree library) to parse customer code while preserving formatting. For each of the 14 transformations, write a CST visitor that matches the v…
- Abstract Syntax Trees
- Source To Source Transformation
- Python
Compiler Construction - DesignBeginnerNew
Add Constant Folding and Dead Code Elimination to a Teaching Compiler
Using the provided intermediate-representation specification, design and propose constant folding and dead code elimination as two intermediate-representation-to-intermediate-re…
- Intermediate Representation
- Constant Folding
- Dead Code Elimination
Open coursework - DesignBeginnerNew
Design a Playwright Checkout Test Suite That Blocks Bad Merges
Using the checkout incident export, identify the single most valuable happy path plus the six edge cases tied to the most frequent and most severe past incidents (for example fa…
- End To End Testing
- Playwright
- Ci Cd
Open coursework - CodeIntermediateNew
Deploy SDN-Based Network Slicing for a Telco Operator
Receive the current transport architecture (P4-programmable switches, ONOS controller cluster), the 3 customer-class SLAs (consumer: best-effort 50 Mbps; enterprise IoT: 5 Mbps …
- Sdn
- Onos
- Mininet
Advanced Computer Networks - DesignSeniorNew
Design an AVX-512 Vectorization Proposal for a Hot Simulation Kernel
Working only from the provided scalar kernel module, the benchmark dataset, the profiling readout, and the target-environment brief, propose and justify a vectorization design f…
- Vectorization
- Llvm
- Loop Optimization
Open coursework - CodeSeniorNew
Physically-Based Path Tracer for a Product Visualization Studio
Build a path tracer in C++ with: ray-triangle and ray-sphere intersection on a BVH (bounding volume hierarchy), Lambertian diffuse and Cook-Torrance GGX specular BRDFs, multiple…
- Physically Based Rendering
- Path Tracing
- Shading And Lighting
Advanced Computer Graphics - AnalysisIntermediateNew
Spectral Clustering Proposal for Customer Segmentation at Cadence
Using the provided customer usage sample, construct a similarity graph (k-nearest-neighbors with k=15 and Gaussian radial-basis-function edge weights), compute the normalized gr…
- Spectral Methods
- Linear Algebra
- Algorithm Analysis
Open coursework - CodeBeginnerNew
Build a CPU-Only Teaching Rasterizer in C++
Using the provided test-scene model file and the reference render image, implement a software rasterizer in C++ that runs only on the central processor. Build the supporting mat…
- Rasterization
- Geometric Transformations
- 3d Rendering
Open coursework - CodeSeniorNew
Build a Lock-Free MPMC Queue for a Trading-Backend Hot Path
Implement Vyukov's bounded MPMC queue in C++20 using atomic operations with explicit memory orderings (relaxed where safe, acquire/release on the enqueue/dequeue handshake). Use…
- Lock Free Algorithms
- Memory Models
- Cpp
Advanced Concurrency and Parallel Computing - AnalysisSeniorNew
Amortized-Analysis Investigation of a Production Telemetry Cache
Working only from the three provided materials — the de-identified incident record (incident-record), the representative cache source module (cache-source), and the recorded ope…
- Amortized Analysis
- Data Structures
- Algorithm Analysis
Open coursework - CodeIntermediateNew
Detect Atrial Fibrillation from Wearable Heart-Rate Data
Build a Python pipeline that ingests raw PPG + accelerometer at 100Hz, applies motion-artifact rejection using the accelerometer channel, detects beats, computes RR-interval irr…
- Health Sensing
- Signal Processing
- Biomedical Signals
Computational Biology and Health Informatics - DesignBeginnerNew
Design a Verified UART Receiver and Loopback for an FPGA Sensor Hub
Propose and deliver a UART receiver for Helax's sensor hub that meets the functional requirements in the requirements brief (the 'uart-requirements-brief' material): 16-times ov…
- Verilog
- Uart
- Fpga
Open coursework - CodeBeginnerNew
Convert an Imperative Recommendation Service to Pure Functional Style
Take the Python ranking module (around 900 lines). Identify side-effects (DB reads, cache lookups, logging, time) and lift them to the boundary. Rewrite the ranking core in Scal…
- Scala Programming
- Pure Functions
- Functional Core Imperative Shell
Functional Programming - CodeSeniorNew
Real-Time Global Illumination for an Indie Game
Survey 3 candidate GI techniques: voxel cone tracing (VXGI-style), screen-space GI (SSGI), and irradiance probe volumes. Pick one and justify based on quality/perf trade-offs fo…
- Physically Based Rendering
- Global Illumination
- Gpu Pipeline
Open coursework - AnalysisSeniorNew
Memory Consistency Model Audit of a Lock-Free Queue
Read the SPSC queue source (around 200 lines of C++). For each atomic operation, classify the required ordering and verify the chosen memory_order is sufficient under both x86-T…
- Memory Consistency
- Concurrency
- Lock Free Programming
Advanced Computer Architecture - CodeSeniorNew
Vectorize a Risk-Calculation Engine for a Mid-Cap Bank
Receive the existing pricer (C++17, scalar, around 600 lines), 2 weeks of representative input data (around 50M paths), the validation harness, and access to an Intel Ice Lake-S…
- Vectorization
- Avx 512
- Simd
Performance Engineering of Software Systems - DesignBeginnerNew
Greedy Delivery-Slot Assignment for a Munich Grocery Startup
Using the provided order history sample, rider roster, and manual dispatch baseline, design and implement a greedy slot-assignment algorithm in Python. The algorithm must (1) so…
- Greedy Algorithms
- Algorithm Analysis
- Python
Open coursework - CodeBeginnerNew
Build a Plugin-Based Notification Framework With Observer + Factory
Implement, in Java 21: an EventBus that supports typed subscriptions, a NotificationChannel interface with concrete subtypes (Push, Email, InApp, SMS), an AbstractChannelFactory…
- Java
- Design Patterns
- Oo Design
Object-Oriented Programming and Design - CodeSeniorNew
Envoy WASM Filter for Per-Tenant Rate Limiting
Implement the filter in Rust using the proxy-wasm-rust-sdk. The filter computes a (tenant_id, endpoint, method) key, calls a Redis token-bucket service via a sidecar HTTP client…
- Envoy
- Wasm
- Rust Programming
Service Mesh and Microservices Networking - DesignBeginnerNew
Design a Sequential Vending-Machine Controller in VHDL
Design an FSM that accepts 10c, 20c, 50c, EUR 1 coins, supports 4 products priced EUR 1.20-1.80, dispenses the selected product when paid, returns change, handles cancel. Choose…
- Vhdl
- Fsm Design
- Sequential Circuits
Digital Systems Design - CodeSeniorNew
Rebuild a Fair Single-Selfie Avatar Pipeline at NorthRoom
Using the prior-attempt postmortem (provided), the cohort manifest (provided), the FairFace public image set (provided link), the FLAME face-model resource (provided link), and …
- Digital Humans
- Geometry Processing
- 3d Rendering
Open coursework - CodeBeginnerNew
Build a Safe Expression Evaluator for a Math-Learning App
Working only from the materials provided, build a self-contained expression evaluator in Python (TypeScript is acceptable if you mirror the same structure) that never calls eval…
- Recursion
- Higher Order Functions
- Parsing
Open coursework - ResearchIntermediateNew
Design an Empirical Study of Pull Request Review Throughput
Using the provided pull request dataset and the stakeholder brief, design and run an empirical software-engineering study on review throughput. State three falsifiable hypothese…
- Empirical Software Engineering
- Software Analytics
- Statistical Analysis
Open coursework - CodeSeniorNew
Design a Polyhedral Loop-Tiling Strategy for a Tensor DSL
Study the DSL's IR (provided, MLIR-based with linalg-style ops). Choose a tiling strategy (rectangular tiling with cost-modeled tile sizes is the safe baseline; full polyhedral …
- Polyhedral Analysis
- Loop Tiling
- Mlir
Advanced Compilers and Program Optimization - AnalysisSeniorNew
Diagnose a Hard-Real-Time Failure in an Automotive ECU
Receive anonymized AUTOSAR runnable + task traces (CSV + Vector CANalyzer .blf), 8 hours covering 3 failure events. Identify timing budget per task and runnable. Reproduce on th…
- Autosar
- Real Time Debugging
- Can Bus Analysis
Open coursework - CodeIntermediateNew
Automated Planner for a Field-Service Maintenance Schedule
Model the scheduling problem as either PDDL (Planning Domain Definition Language) or a constraint-satisfaction problem using a solver like OR-Tools. Define: actions (visit_site,…
- Planning
- Constraint Satisfaction
- Python Programming
Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (CS Elective) - CodeSeniorNew
Build Co-Located Mixed-Reality Engine Inspection Training
Build a Unity prototype that supports three people wearing Magic Leap 2 headsets (or Quest 3 with passthrough as a fallback) in the same physical room, all seeing one shared vir…
- Mixed Reality Applications
- Multiplayer Xr
- Shared Anchors
Open coursework - CodeSeniorNew
PDE Solver for Subsurface Reservoir Flow
Implement MPFA-O discretization for pressure on a tetrahedral mesh with explicit fault transmissibility (Aavatsmark et al. 2002 formulation). Couple to a temperature equation vi…
- Numerical Pdes
- Finite Volume
- Newton Krylov
Scientific Computing and Numerical Methods - CodeIntermediateNew
Apply the Mikado Method to Untangle a Tax-Engine Class
Starting from the live codebase (Java 17, 73 percent line coverage), write a failing test that asserts the desired end state ('TaxCalculator is decomposed into per-country strat…
- Mikado Method
- Refactoring
- Strategy Pattern
Refactoring and Code Smell Detection - DesignIntermediateNew
Design Parallel I/O for a Climate-Simulation Data Pipeline
Analyze the current I/O pattern: each MPI rank writes its own file via serial HDF5 (the classic anti-pattern). Design a single shared file using parallel HDF5 + MPI-IO with coll…
- Mpi Io
- Parallel Hdf5
- Lustre Filesystem
High-Performance and Scientific Computing - CodeIntermediateNew
Tune a Multicore Pipeline with NUMA-Aware Sharding
Receive the current worker (Rust, around 8,000 lines, uses rayon for its parallelism), the host (2-socket AMD EPYC 9354, 64 cores total, 384GB DDR5), and a benchmark query workl…
- Parallel Performance
- Numa
- Rust
Advanced Concurrency and Parallel Computing - CodeIntermediateNew
Out-of-Order Execution Microbenchmark Suite
Design and implement 6 microbenchmarks: ROB capacity probe (varying chain length), load-store queue probe, branch mispredict cost probe, ILP saturation probe, store-to-load forw…
- Out Of Order Execution
- Performance Counters
- Benchmarking
Advanced Computer Architecture - CodeIntermediateNew
Edge-Inference Pipeline for a Smart-Factory Vibration Monitor
Architect a pipeline that runs on an ESP32-S3 + STM32 combo (provided): (1) sample 3-axis accelerometer at 3.2 kHz, (2) compute windowed FFT features on-device every 1s, (3) run…
- Edge Computing
- Embedded Systems
- Sensors And Actuators
Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems - AnalysisIntermediateNew
Map Knowledge Diffusion Across an Open-Source Project Ecosystem
Using the de-identified contributor activity export (material 1), build a temporal contributor-project network from the recorded events, then collapse it into a contributor-to-c…
- Network Science
- Temporal Networks
- Graph Analysis
Open coursework - AnalysisIntermediateNew
Build a Performance Model for a Molecular-Dynamics Job
Build an analytical performance model covering: compute time per step (function of atom count + cutoff + interaction type), inter-rank communication cost (function of decomposit…
- Performance Modeling
- Gromacs
- Benchmark Design
High-Performance and Scientific Computing - CodeIntermediateNew
Port a Drone Flight Controller from Bare-Metal to FreeRTOS
Take the existing bare-metal firmware (STM32H7, around 14,000 lines C). Identify the tasks (control loop 1 kHz, IMU read 2 kHz, GPS 10 Hz, telemetry 50 Hz, command parsing event…
- Freertos
- Rate Monotonic Scheduling
- C Programming
Open coursework - CodeIntermediateNew
Build a Real-Time Draped-Cloth Simulator for an Online Fashion Showroom
Build a position-based-dynamics cloth solver and wrap it in a Three.js viewer. Starting from the provided cloth-solver starter module, implement a triangulated cloth mesh with d…
- Physically Based Simulation
- 3d Rendering
- Webgl
Open coursework - CodeIntermediateNew
Write a Linux Device Driver for a Custom Sensor Board
Read the SPI sensor datasheet (provided) and the existing user-space hack (around 600 lines of C). Write a Linux kernel module (target kernel 6.6 LTS) that registers a hwmon dev…
- C Programming
- Os Interfaces
- Kernel Development
Imperative and Low-Level Programming - AnalysisBeginnerNew
Re-segment a SaaS Customer Base by How Accounts Actually Use the Product
Using the provided usage signals dataset, engineer features that capture how deeply and how often accounts use the product (not just raw volume), standardize them, and run at le…
- Clustering
- K Means
- Hdbscan
Open coursework - CodeBeginnerNew
Image-Classification Model for a Quality-Control Line at a Bottling Plant
Train an image classifier on 8,000 labeled bottle images (3 defect classes + 'ok'). Use transfer learning from a pre-trained backbone (EfficientNet-B0 or MobileNetV3) — the line…
- Deep Learning
- Supervised Learning
- Ml Applications
Machine Learning (CS Elective) - ResearchBeginnerNew
Research Roadmap for Meridian DSP's Bid-Matching Pipeline
Using the VP of Machine Learning's context memo (vp-brief) and the pipeline case file (pipeline-case-file) to ground every recommendation in Meridian's actual system, assemble a…
- Information Retrieval
- Learning To Rank
- Research Synthesis
Open coursework - AnalysisIntermediateNew
Detect Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior on a National News Platform
Receive an anonymized 90-day export of comments (user_id, article_id, timestamp, like_count, reply_to_id) and basic user metadata (registration date, login pattern bucket). Buil…
- Network Science
- Community Detection
- Graph Analysis
Network Science and Computational Social Science - DesignIntermediateNew
Design an Invoice-Rules Mini-Language for Non-Technical Users
Design a rule mini-language whose grammar (written in Backus-Naur Form, the standard notation for describing grammars) covers boolean logic (and / or / not), comparison operator…
- Abstraction
- Recursion
- Domain Specific Language
Open coursework - CodeIntermediateNew
Port a Monte Carlo Engine to CUDA for an Asset Manager
Profile the CPU MC engine to identify the kernel candidates: path generation (Brownian motion + correlated factors), payoff evaluation, aggregation. Port to CUDA: use cuRAND for…
- Cuda
- Monte Carlo
- Gpu Programming
Open coursework - CodeIntermediateNew
Index a Reference Genome with a Suffix Array in Rust
Using the reference-genome FASTA in the provided materials, build an in-memory suffix array (DC3 or SA-IS construction) over the 4-letter DNA alphabet in Rust, then implement co…
- Suffix Arrays
- String Algorithms
- Rust
Open coursework - CodeIntermediateNew
MinHash Similarity Sketch for a Job-Board Deduplication Pipeline
Implement a MinHash signature generator (128 permutations) over shingled job-posting text (5-gram word shingles). Build an LSH banding index (16 bands of 8 hashes each) tuned fo…
- Minhash
- Locality Sensitive Hashing
- Probabilistic Data Structures
Randomized Algorithms - CodeIntermediateNew
Kill Surviving Mutants in a Travel Pricing Service
Work entirely from the provided pricing module (pricing-module) and its existing test suite (existing-tests), using the scenario facts in the briefing document (challenge-brief)…
- Mutation Testing
- Java
- Junit
Open coursework - CodeBeginnerNew
Refactor a Tangled Java Pricing Engine With Design Patterns
Start from a provided Java 21 codebase with the legacy PricingEngine class, 38 example fixtures (input cart, expected price), and one failing test demonstrating a bug from last …
- Java
- Design Patterns
- Refactoring
Object-Oriented Programming and Design
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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
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Step 06
Add it to LinkedIn with one click.
Related roles you may want to explore
Browse all roles →Software Engineering
Backend Engineer
Behind every app a user touches, there's a quieter system doing the actual work — routing requests, holding state, refusing bad input politely. Backend engineers build and care for that hidden layer. The role is part craft, part diplomacy: you're designing APIs that other engineers will lean on for years, and a careless schema choice can echo through a company for a long time. Good work here looks like code that's boring in the best way — predictable under load, easy for the next person to read, observable when something breaks. Students grow into this role by getting comfortable with Python or another server language, then learning how databases really behave when traffic spikes.
Software Engineering
Frontend Engineer
Every button a user clicks, every loading state they wait through, every form that almost-but-not-quite works, all of it passed through a frontend engineer's editor. This is the discipline that decides how software feels. The role lives at a peculiar intersection of design empathy, performance budgets, and accessibility standards, which is why students who like both visual craft and systems thinking often find a home here. You'd grow into it by building real things in React or Next.js, reading other people's code, and developing taste for what feels right. Tools like GitHub Copilot accelerate the typing; the judgement about when to refactor and when to ship is still yours. Strong frontend engineers care that a screen reader can navigate their work.
Software Engineering
Full-Stack Engineer
Picture the small startup team where one engineer ships a feature from the database schema to the deployed button. That generalist mindset is what the full-stack engineer brings, even at larger companies. The role exists because most useful software doesn't respect the boundary between client and server, and someone needs to reason about both. Students grow into this by being curious past their comfort zone, picking up PostgreSQL when they came for React, learning OAuth flows when they came for UI. The work rewards people who'd rather understand a whole system than perfect one slice of it. Strong full-stack engineers know when to ask a specialist for help, which is itself a skill worth developing early.
Software Engineering
Mobile Engineer
Open the app on your phone and tap something. The fact that it responded instantly, didn't drain your battery, and worked on a five-year-old device is not an accident — a mobile engineer obsessed over that. This role is for people who care about craft at the interface where software meets a human's pocket. Expect days writing native code against the Android SDK or iOS, profiling animations, fighting flaky tests, and shepherding releases through App Store Connect. Students grow into it by shipping their own small app and feeling the gap between a demo and something a stranger would actually use. Strong mobile engineers treat accessibility as a baseline, not a feature.
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¹ Median annual salary computed from the salary histogram of 50 current Adzuna job postings for "Software Engineer" in United States, fetched May 2026. Skills come from the disciplines tagged on live Ewance challenges for this role.
Portrait: Photo by Donald Teel on Unsplash.