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Pick the role you're building toward.
Every role below opens onto real-world challenges drawn from the work people in that role actually do. Solve them, ship them, walk away with a verified credential.
Engineering Leadership
Engineering Manager
The first time you see a software team ship something hard on time, with everyone still talking to each other, you realize how much craft sits in engineering management. The role exists to make a team of engineers more effective than they would be alone, through coaching, planning, removing obstacles, and shaping the technical direction without doing all the coding yourself. Students who eventually want this path usually start as strong engineers and discover they care about people as much as code. A good manager can run a useful 1:1, defend a roadmap, and notice when an engineer is quietly burning out. You grow into it by leading projects first, then taking on direct reports once the technical instincts are solid.
21 challenges available →Engineering Leadership
Tech Lead
Between an engineering team that wants to ship and a product organization that wants to plan stands the tech lead. The role is technical first — you're still writing code, reviewing pull requests, and authoring the RFC that settles a design debate — but the harder part is influence: setting a quality bar without becoming a bottleneck, mentoring without rescuing, pushing back on a deadline with evidence rather than instinct. Cloud platforms and CI/CD pipelines are table stakes; what distinguishes a strong tech lead is how they handle disagreement and how their team grows under them. Students who enjoyed being the group project leader for the right reasons often arrive here naturally. Growth comes from leading real projects whose outcomes you can be honest about.
14 challenges available →
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Industry teams can shape briefs around the skills they hire for, then evaluate students on rubric-scored deliverables — not resumes.