Portfolio Projects That Actually Get You Hired

A portfolio of to-do apps looks like everyone else's. These projects are real broken production systems you debug in a live cloud workspace, and every fix lands on a portfolio a hiring manager can open and click. A curated mix across every engineering track.

Why a portfolio of fixes beats a portfolio of clones

A portfolio answers one question in the four seconds before the tab closes: can this person do the work? A wall of green-field clones answers "they can follow a tutorial." A set of production fixes answers "they can walk into my codebase on a Tuesday and not break it." Since a machine now builds the clone in ninety seconds, only the second answer still means anything.

24 projects to start with

Build an End-to-End RAG PipelineAI/ML · SeniorBuild an LLM Evaluation Harness (Golden Set)AI/ML · SeniorRoute LLM Requests to Cheaper ModelsAI/ML · SeniorBuild a Tool-Calling Agent LoopAI/ML · SeniorAdd a NOT NULL Column With a Zero-Downtime BackfillBackend · SeniorRefactor Globals Into Dependency InjectionBackend · SeniorDesign a URL Shortener (System Design)Backend · SeniorDesign a Rate Limiter (Token Bucket)Backend · SeniorBuild a Kimball Star SchemaData · SeniorBuild an Exactly-Once Kafka PipelineData · SeniorSwitch Batch ETL to Streaming on AWS KinesisData · SeniorShip a Zero-Downtime Blue-Green DeployDevOps · SeniorPackage an App as a Helm ChartDevOps · SeniorMove Secrets Into HashiCorp VaultDevOps · SeniorDeploy a React App Globally With AWS CloudFrontFullstack · SeniorReplace LIKE Search With Postgres Full-Text SearchFullstack · SeniorLock Down a Namespace With a NetworkPolicyKubernetes · SeniorWrite a Helm Chart for a Multi-Service AppKubernetes · SeniorRun a Multi-Container Pod with a SidecarKubernetes · SeniorSpread Replicas with Pod Anti-AffinityKubernetes · SeniorSecure a Webhook Endpoint (HMAC + Replay)Security · SeniorMove JWT to httpOnly Cookies (XSS + CSRF)Security · SeniorBuild a Data Quality Monitoring APIData · MidTrace an Nginx 503 CascadeDevOps · Mid

What makes a portfolio piece worth clicking

Pick fixes that show range, not repetition: one infra outage, one data bug, one security hole beats three variations of the same CRUD app. For each, make the diagnosis visible - the theory you ruled out, the log line that gave it away - because that reasoning is the part AI cannot fake and the exact part an interviewer will probe.

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