Mentors who are staff engineers
Work with staff and above engineers on the part of the job nobody documents: choosing what to work on, influencing without authority, and building a promotion case that survives review.
Before you book a staff engineer mentor
How do I choose the right staff engineer mentor?
The senior-to-staff step is the first promotion that is not primarily about getting better at engineering. It is about picking problems that matter, making other teams' work possible, and being legible to people who never see your code. Most engineers who stall at senior are stalling on the second half, not the first.
What should I bring to a staff engineer mentor session?
Bring the actual artefacts: your last review, the promo document if you have started one, and the two or three projects you would put in it. A mentor who has written and defended those documents can tell you within a session whether your case is short on scope, short on evidence, or genuinely not ready.
Ask specifically about the difference between what your company writes in its levelling rubric and what it actually promotes for. That gap is where careers stall, and only someone inside a similar organisation can describe it honestly.
What people bring to these sessions
- What actually separates senior from staff
- Choosing problems with organisational leverage
- Writing and defending a promotion document
- Influencing teams you have no authority over
- Staying technical without becoming a manager
6 mentors
- Dmytro Kovalenko — Lead/Staff Software Engineer at netflix. Artificial intelligence, Backend, High load systems
- Bita Kazemi — Staff Software Engineer at atlassian. Career guidance, Handling layoffs and job loss, Recovering from career setbacks
- Akshay Kapoor — Senior Cloud Infrastructure Architect at amazon web services (aws). Site Reliability Engineering, Server Architecture, Cloud Application Development
- Madhukar Sharma — Staff Engineer, IoT Product Lead at qualcomm. C, C++, Linux Kernel Internals
- Kruti Shah — Staff Software Engineer at netflix. JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3
- John Kanagaraj — Sr. Data Architect at ex-paypal,ebay, cisco, shell international. Big data, Database management, Oracle database