This is solved (or exacerbated, depending on your point of view) in non-English speaking environments that nonetheless use English terms of art.

In my case, we use "low-level" (in English) to convey the "close to the metal", systems programming idea, and the direct translation of "low-level" to refer to shoddy code.

I think you are unnecessarily censoring yourself. Low-level software in computer circles means that it is closer to the metal and no computer engineer in their right mind will consider low-level software to mean software that require less skill to write.

When I first started grad school as a biomedical engineer, I did a rotation in a neurophysiologist lab who was looking at how turtle neurons are able to survive longer without oxygen, hoping along the way to apply it to stroke survival, etc. But, his overall goal was to learn about how the brain stem controls respiration.

I described this guy and his lab to my parents as a "basic science" which they took to mean it was simple "easy" science. In reality he has studied the same square millimeter of turtle brain and a few proteins for decades, and knows it better probably than anyone who has ever lived.

In these contexts, "basic" and "low-level" means "insane level of detail that no one else wants to bother with."

If he was an engineer who didn't know what "low-level software" meant, then he was also a low-level engineer, so you weren't wrong either way.