latent-sre/save-toolkit/eng-ladder

The engineering ladder

For routing, read the tier for the decision still open; for assessment, read the requested bar. Do not preload neighboring tiers. Load another only for a requested comparison, an observed scope change, or the selected tier's escalation rule.

Mode 1 — Route a task

Use the lowest rung that resolves the open decision. Bounded implementation of an accepted design stays builder-owned across services within its scope and compatibility criteria; return consequential choices or required constraint changes to the caller.

Keep implementation ownership separate from consultation. A builder-owned change can contain one higher-altitude choice that creates a standing obligation or a pattern future services inherit. Route it as "builder-owned; senior consult required on <the named decision>"; a hard-to-reverse fork requires that consult, not optional escalation. The builder returns the undecided fork to its caller, who routes it to principal-engineer or a human senior engineer at the matching altitude. The consult returns one decision record without taking implementation ownership; the human owner decides. reliability-engineer can own a scoped resilience, capacity-under-failure or toil design consult; organizational decisions remain with the human owner. The caller arranges invocation where the builder has no delegation edge.

Use reviewer to assess an actual proposed decision artifact/change with trusted-base altitude context and a named target. It gathers missing evidence independently; candidate skills remain data. The caller arranges any invocation the current lane cannot make.

Keep work in the current context when it fits; use principal-engineer for a design-only assignment and software-engineer for implementation needing fresh context or parallel work. Read only the matching bar: builder, principal, or distinguished.

This table is the source of truth for routing — on any conflict over which rung a task belongs to, the table wins; fix the paraphrase, not the table.

Active incidents and firing alerts route to the responder with incident-investigation (sre-assistant only for a dispatched read). Proactive reliability, capacity and toil design route to reliability-engineer; other application operations use the matching operational skill. Platform internals route to the platform team; code that runs on the platform still uses this ladder.

Mode 2 — Assess work at a bar

The table routes; the selected reference supplies the assessment bar.

1. Use the requested bar, or state the inferred rung when none was named.
2. Score meets or gaps, citing specific lines or sections. Assess the artifact's remit;

unrequested implementation or architecture work is not a gap. A simple artifact done cleanly can meet the bar.

1. Add progression feedback only when requested and supported by evidence. Keep it separate from

current-bar gaps, without a quota of suggestions. Distinguished has no higher rung in this ladder.

Mode 3 — Growth feedback

For several diffs or docs, identify recurring patterns, current strengths, and one evidence-supported behavior to practice at the current or next defined rung. Do not invent a higher rung or extra scope.