L2 Senior Engineer — Technology Guild Criteria
These criteria define the Technology Guild’s expectations for a Senior Engineer (L2). They are authored and governed by the Technology Guild and aggregated into the L2 Senior 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 |
|---|---|---|
| L2-SEM01 | Designs and delivers production-ready changes spanning multiple components, with minimal rework after review. | SFIA-PROG-3 |
| L2-SEM02 | Designs automated test coverage — unit, integration, regression — for features they own, and closes coverage gaps they find. | SFIA-TEST-3 |
| L2-SEM03 | Performs constructive code reviews that catch real defects and coach L0–L1 engineers on standards. | SFIA-PROG-3 |
| L2-SEM04 | Refactors and pays down technical debt within their workstream, keeping changes safe through tests and incremental delivery. | SFIA-SWDN-3 |
Platform Architecture
| ID | Criterion | Skill |
|---|---|---|
| L2-PAM01 | Makes sound component-level design decisions — libraries, data stores, service boundaries — within platform guardrails, documenting trade-offs. | SFIA-DESN-3 |
| L2-PAM02 | Contributes improvements to shared platform assets — templates, reference implementations, IaC modules — used beyond their own project. | SFIA-DESN-3 |
| L2-PAM03 | Evaluates emerging tools or services relevant to their workstream and presents findings with a recommendation. | SFIA-METL-3 |
| L2-PAM04 | Designs and maintains the infrastructure-as-code for the solutions they own — modular, reviewed, and reproducible across environments. | SFIA-ITOP-3 |
Application Architecture
| ID | Criterion | Skill |
|---|---|---|
| L2-AAM01 | Designs improvements to Calab’s internal application architecture — integrations, automations, data flows across PM, service, accounting, and document systems — documenting trade-offs. | SFIA-DESN-3 |
| L2-AAM02 | Owns an internal system integration end-to-end: keeps it reliable, monitored, and documented so others can operate it. | SFIA-SINT-3 |
Agentic Engineering
| ID | Criterion | Skill |
|---|---|---|
| L2-AIE01 | Decomposes feature work into well-scoped tasks for coding agents, runs them effectively — context, guardrails, iteration — and critically reviews output before merge. | CALAB-AGE-2 |
| L2-AIE02 | Builds and maintains reusable context assets — prompts, instruction files, skills, MCP configs — that raise the whole team’s agent effectiveness. | CALAB-CTX-2 |
| L2-AIE03 | Designs lightweight evaluations — test harnesses, spot-check protocols, regression suites — to verify the quality of AI-generated output. | CALAB-EVL-2 |
| L2-AIE04 | Integrates LLM capabilities — APIs, retrieval, structured output — into solution features, handling non-determinism, cost, and failure modes. | SFIA-MLNG-3 |
Security Engineering
| ID | Criterion | Skill |
|---|---|---|
| L2-SEC01 | Threat-models the features they design — attack surfaces, data exposure, authentication and authorisation needs — before building. | SFIA-SCTY-3 |
| L2-SEC02 | Remediates vulnerabilities across their workstream — dependencies, misconfigurations, code flaws — verifying fixes and preventing recurrence. | SFIA-VUAS-3 |
| L2-SEC03 | Configures pipeline security tooling — SAST, dependency scanning, secret scanning — for repos they own, keeping the signal actionable. | SFIA-SCTY-3 |
Data Engineering
| ID | Criterion | Skill |
|---|---|---|
| L2-DAT01 | Builds reliable data pipelines and transformations for their workstream, with idempotency, error handling, and monitoring. | SFIA-DENG-3 |
| L2-DAT02 | Designs fit-for-purpose data models for features they own, documenting structure and trade-offs. | SFIA-DTAN-3 |
| L2-DAT03 | Implements data-quality checks — validation rules, reconciliation, alerts — so bad data is caught before it reaches consumers. | SFIA-DENG-3 |
DevOps Management
| ID | Criterion | Skill |
|---|---|---|
| L2-DVO01 | Maintains and improves CI/CD pipelines for repos they own — adds stages, speeds up feedback, keeps them green. | SFIA-DEPL-3 |
| L2-DVO02 | Implements observability for features they ship — logging, metrics, alerts — sufficient for someone else to diagnose issues. | SFIA-ITOP-3 |
| L2-DVO03 | Leads diagnosis and resolution of incidents in their workstream, communicating status and following up with prevention actions. | SFIA-USUP-3 |