Overview
Akylade is a US-based cybersecurity certification company with a mission to bridge the gap between learning and doing. They offer eight ISO 17024-aligned certifications across four pathways: Cyber Resilience, Cyber Risk Management, AI Security, and Secure Development, positioned as a practical, affordable alternative to traditional providers like CompTIA and ISC2.
To deliver training at scale, they run an Authorized Training Partner (ATP) program with a growing network of partner organizations worldwide.
My Role
As the Senior Product Engineer, I own the platform end-to-end: database schema design, backend API development, frontend implementation across all three portals, and all third-party integrations.
The Challenge
The platform had to serve three distinct user groups: members, ATP partners, and an internal admin team, each with separate workflows and data boundaries. On top of that, Akylade doesn't administer exams directly; candidates cross over to Certiverse for the actual exam, so the handoff had to feel seamless and the certification status had to flow back into the member dashboard.
When I came in, product and billing management was entirely manual. Adding a new certification package meant editing code and redeploying. The business couldn't ship or adjust a product without engineering involvement. Beyond that, the platform had grown organically across three portals without a unified architecture: no shared module layer, inconsistent data-fetching patterns, and no clear ownership boundaries between surfaces.
The Platform
Member Portal
The consumer-facing surface. Members browse Akylade's certification catalog, purchase courses and exam packages, then access their personal learning dashboard. The experience covers structured course content, quizzes, and practice exams across all four certification pathways. When a member is ready to sit their exam, they connect their Akylade account to Certiverse directly from the portal, scheduling the exam and tracking their certification status without leaving the ecosystem.
ATP Portal
ATP partners are the primary pipeline for certification candidates, spanning training companies, academies, and community organizations across the cybersecurity space. Their portal gives partners full control over their course catalog: uploading and editing content, structuring modules, and monitoring student progress. The ATP surface is intentionally separated from the member experience. Partners manage supply, members consume it.
Admin Portal
The internal command center. Gives the Akylade team a birds-eye view of the entire platform: members, partners, courses, certifications, and transactions, without requiring direct database access.
Technical Deep Dive
Stripe Product Lifecycle Management
The first thing I built was a dedicated product management system in the admin portal, backed by a purpose-built database schema that mirrors and extends Stripe's product and pricing model. All billing flows through Stripe: subscription management, coupon and promo code redemptions, and a webhook pipeline that keeps the platform in sync with payment events (renewals, failures, cancellations, disputes) without duplicating billing logic on our side. Admins can create, edit, and retire products entirely from within the platform: no code changes, no deployments, no engineering tickets for a pricing update.
A key design decision was introducing a progressive visibility model. A product synced from Stripe doesn't automatically become visible on the consumer-facing catalog. It moves through draft and preview stages before going live, giving the business a safe, repeatable process for releasing new certification packages without the risk of exposing half-finished products to paying customers.
Architecture Refactor: Establishing a Rendering Contract
Page-level data such as enrollment state, course progress, and certification eligibility is fetched by server components, dehydrated into the React Query cache, and rehydrated on the client before first paint. From there, interactive surfaces like the lesson viewer, quiz engine, and progress tracker are fully client-driven. User interactions flow through dedicated domain hooks, which call Next.js Server Actions directly, keeping Prisma and MongoDB access server-side without a traditional API layer in between.
Each hook owns the full mutation lifecycle: optimistic update on onMutate, rollback on onError, and targeted cache invalidation on onSettled via centralized query key factories. Prisma-generated TypeScript types serve as the shared contract between server actions and hooks, with multi-collection writes wrapped in Prisma transactions to prevent partial writes.
Key Integrations
Certiverse
The bridge between learning and official certification. Members connect their Akylade account to Certiverse through a secure integration built into the member portal, enabling exam scheduling and real-time certification status tracking from within the platform.
LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability)
Several ATP partners run institutional LMS environments on Moodle and Canvas. Rather than disrupting their existing workflows, I built an LTI plugin that instructors install directly into their LMS. From there, they can browse and select which Akylade courses to offer their students, all without leaving their institution's environment.
Accredible
Once a passing result is confirmed via Certiverse, the platform automatically triggers credential issuance through the Accredible API. Members receive a personalized, verifiable certificate and badge surfaced directly in their dashboard, shareable to LinkedIn or any external profile. Revocation and expiry are managed programmatically, so no manual certificate handling is required.