L1 Engineer

L1 Engineer — Technology Guild Criteria

These criteria define the Technology Guild’s expectations for an Engineer (L1). They are authored and governed by the Technology Guild and aggregated into the L1 Engineer Evaluation Workbook by the HR Management practice. The Skill column maps each criterion to a skill and level in the Calab Skills Registry.

Criteria by Capability Area

Software Engineering

ID	Criterion	Skill
L1-SEM01	Delivers assigned, well-scoped code changes that build, pass existing tests, and merge after review with only expected rework.	SFIA-PROG-2
L1-SEM02	Writes or updates unit tests for the code they change, following the team’s established test patterns.	SFIA-TEST-2
L1-SEM03	Uses the team’s standard toolchain correctly — version control, branching, code review workflow — with occasional guidance.	SFIA-CFMG-2
L1-SEM04	Documents their changes clearly: commit messages, PR descriptions, and comments that explain non-obvious decisions.	SFIA-PROG-2

Platform Architecture

ID	Criterion	Skill
L1-PAM01	Builds within the platform’s architectural standards — approved patterns, services, repositories — and asks when standards are unclear.	SFIA-DESN-2
L1-PAM02	Can explain the high-level architecture of the solutions they work on: main components, data flow, and hosting.	SFIA-KNGE-2
L1-PAM03	Flags when a task appears to conflict with documented architecture or standards instead of silently working around it.	SFIA-AUTO-2
L1-PAM04	Provisions and changes cloud resources only through the approved infrastructure-as-code workflow — never manual changes to managed environments.	SFIA-ITOP-2

Application Architecture

ID	Criterion	Skill
L1-AAM01	Can explain Calab’s internal application landscape — which system is the source of truth for projects, services, documents, and finance — and keeps records where they belong.	SFIA-KNGE-2
L1-AAM02	Builds small automations and integrations between internal tools using approved patterns, documenting what they connect.	SFIA-SINT-2

Agentic Engineering

ID	Criterion	Skill
L1-AIE01	Uses approved AI coding assistants and agents for day-to-day tasks, and reviews, tests, and understands all generated code before submitting it as their own work.	CALAB-AGE-1
L1-AIE02	Provides effective prompts and context — specs, code, examples — to get useful output from AI tools, iterating when output misses.	CALAB-CTX-1
L1-AIE03	Identifies common failure modes in AI output — hallucinated APIs, insecure patterns, licence-risk code — and corrects them before merge.	CALAB-EVL-1
L1-AIE04	Follows Calab’s AI usage policies: approved tools only, no confidential or client data into unapproved systems.	SFIA-SCTY-2

Security Engineering

ID	Criterion	Skill
L1-SEC01	Handles secrets, credentials, and client data per policy — never commits secrets; uses approved vaults and identity.	SFIA-SCTY-2
L1-SEC02	Applies secure coding basics in their changes — input validation, parameterised queries, least-privilege defaults — and fixes security review findings.	SFIA-SCTY-2
L1-SEC03	Triages or escalates dependency and vulnerability alerts on their assigned repos within agreed timeframes.	SFIA-VUAS-2

Data Engineering

ID	Criterion	Skill
L1-DAT01	Writes and modifies queries and simple transformations correctly, verifying results against expected outputs before use.	SFIA-DENG-2
L1-DAT02	Follows the solution’s data model and naming standards when adding or changing fields, tables, or schemas.	SFIA-DTAN-2
L1-DAT03	Works with client data only in approved environments and datasets; never copies production data to unapproved locations.	SFIA-SCTY-2

DevOps Management

ID	Criterion	Skill
L1-DVO01	Uses the team’s CI/CD pipelines correctly — knows what stages run, reads failures, and fixes their own broken builds.	SFIA-DEPL-2
L1-DVO02	Deploys changes to non-production environments following the documented process, verifying success and rolling back under direction.	SFIA-DEPL-2
L1-DVO03	Investigates incidents on their assigned components using logs and monitoring under direction, documenting findings.	SFIA-USUP-2