Knowing how to vet a senior Sanity CMS developer is harder than it sounds. The title 'senior' is self-applied on most freelance platforms, and Sanity's relatively young ecosystem means a lot of developers have built one or two projects and now market themselves as experts. This guide gives you a practical way to separate genuine seniority from surface-level familiarity — without needing to be a developer yourself.
What 'senior' actually means on the Sanity stack
Seniority on any CMS breaks into two distinct layers: the content modelling layer and the integration layer. A genuinely senior Sanity developer is strong in both.
The content modelling layer is Sanity-specific. It covers how schemas are structured, how documents reference each other, how editors actually experience the Studio day-to-day, and how data is queried. A developer who only knows how to follow Sanity's own tutorial has probably built a handful of fields and a basic page type. A senior developer has run into real problems — circular references, slow Studio loads caused by bloated document types, editors confused by poor field ordering — and has solved them more than once.
The integration layer is where Sanity connects to your front-end (almost always Next.js in 2026). Senior means the developer understands how content changes flow through to a live site without breaking pages mid-publish, how images are served efficiently, and how draft previews are secured. These are not beginner concerns. They become critical at scale and under real editorial pressure.
