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Cloud EngineeringLEVEL 1: The Startup

Seed to Series A (5–20 people)

Your Role
Solo Generalist / First DevOps Hire
Team Size
5–20 engineers
Target Environment
1–3 microservices, single cloud account, rudimentary CI

Level 2 Unlock Criteria (70% Rule)

7 OF 10 + 1 BOSS REQUIRED

Solve any 7 out of the 10 incidents (including at least 1 Boss incident) to automatically unlock Level 2.

Overall Progress0 / 7 required (0/10 total)
Boss Incidents0 / 1 required
Incidents Solved:0/7 target (0%)
Boss Incidents Beaten:0/1 (Required for unlock)

Incidents & Requests (10)

Resolve ≥70% to unlock Level 2
INCIDENT #01

Security Alert: Public S3 Bucket Exposing Customer Invoices

URGENT: Customer invoice S3 bucket has Public Read ACL enabled — Rachel Vance (Chief Information Security Officer)

~8 min20 XP
INCIDENT #02

Critical Vulnerability: Postgres Port 5432 Exposed to 0.0.0.0/0

Production RDS Security Group Ingress Rule 0.0.0.0/0 — Alex Zhao (Staff Security Engineer)

~8 min20 XP
INCIDENT #03

Outage Mitigation: Production Bastion EBS Volume 100% Full

Bastion host rejecting SSH sessions: 'No space left on device' — Devon Clark (On-Call Systems Administrator)

~8 min20 XP
INCIDENT #04

IAM Least Privilege: Eliminate Wildcard '*:*' Admin Rights on Microservice

IAM Role 'orders-service-role' has full AdministratorAccess wildcard — Rachel Vance (Chief Information Security Officer)

~8 min20 XP
INCIDENT #05

FinOps Alert: Zombie Unattached Elastic IPs & Redundant NAT Gateways

AWS Invoice: Why are we paying for 4 unallocated Public IPv4 addresses? — Julian Sterling (Head of Finance & Operations)

~8 min20 XP
INCIDENT #06

Cost & Compliance: CloudWatch Log Groups Missing Retention Limits

Audit finding: Staging CloudWatch log groups set to 'Never Expire' — Rachel Vance (Chief Information Security Officer)

~8 min20 XP
INCIDENT #07

Networking Failure: Private RDS Database Subnet Missing Local Route

Backend container fails healthcheck: 'connection to database host timed out' — Carlos Rivera (Lead Backend Developer)

~8 min20 XP
INCIDENT #08

Compliance Gate: Unencrypted S3 Bucket Storing Customer PII

GDPR/HIPAA Compliance Scan: 'customer-identity-docs' has no default encryption — Rachel Vance (Chief Information Security Officer)

~8 min20 XP
INCIDENT #09BOSS OUTAGE

BOSS INCIDENT: Global Production Down — Load Balancer Security Group Dropped

P0 OUTAGE: https://app.production.corp is completely unreachable! — Elena Rostova (VP of Engineering)

~15 min50 XP
INCIDENT #10BOSS OUTAGE

BOSS INCIDENT: P0 Security Breach — Hardcoded AWS Access Keys in Repository

P0 BREACH: AWS Root Access Keys leaked in git repository! — Rachel Vance (Chief Information Security Officer)

~15 min50 XP