Can I volunteer to be a mentor for junior engineers in my team?

Will it look bad if I volunteer myself to be their career mentor?

I'm 100% sure the answer is "No", especially if your skip level is expecting you to grow team members.

You are a senior engineer. Senior engineers are expected to uplift others to achieve multiplicative impact. This is just how things work, and I'm glad your skip is smart enough to realize that. 😊

Or should I just mentor people who reach out to me?

I'm also a strong "No" on this one. A lot of more junior engineers, even if they have great potential, are very shy and too scared to reach out to a senior engineer like yourself. Being a good senior engineer is all about being proactive. If you see strong SDE 1s and 2s on your team who you really get along well with (code review is a great signal to evaluate this), then you can just reach out to see if they're good for a weekly or bi-weekly 1 on 1 so you can better support them. I'm sure they will be ecstatic.

I talk about this all incredibly in-depth in my case study on mentorship here: Mentoring Junior SWEs [E3] to Senior [E5] In Just 2.5 Years At Meta

I also recommend these resources on effective mentorship:

• "How can I help juniors?"
• "How can I teach and onboard other engineers faster?"
• "How do you answer questions effectively?"