TS, there is RE contest since 2014 (a year after your last update), it is called Flare-On Challenge.
Last year, got six (6) Malaysians finished the challenges (not me, of course).

Besides what @KLKS said about malware analysis (he is a fast reverse-engineer himself), there is also RE like protocol RE (use Wireshark ,etc), and not just software vulnerability, but also hardware vulnerability research.

I am still new to reverse-engineering, but I am proud for having done a few reversing tools like hexdump, exedump, colordump (file color visualizer) and disasm based on Zydis.