How do I find a good mentor at my company to help me level up faster?

One piece of advice I got: mentors choose mentees, not the other way around. If you were mentoring someone, what qualities would you want them to have? Aside from the obvious things like being respectful and hard-working, mentors will gravitate toward people who are high potential and passionate.

If you can cultivate those (and demonstrate them through emails, posts, or team meetings), you'll find that people want to start working with you and giving you advice.

• The 2 main, traditional angles are asking your manager to find someone for you or to enroll in some company-wide mentor/mentee matching program, which a lot of big companies have.
• Unfortunate truth: It will be hard to find a mentor as a staff engineer. In most companies, only 10-15% of the engineering base will be above staff.
• Meta-point: Remove your dependency on a standard mentor who has recurring 1 on 1 meetings with you by learning how to properly observe more senior engineers. The key is to hone in on their behaviors: Focus on how they achieve results rather than their results themselves. Going through their diffs and code reviews is a concrete way to learn from them.

Related resources:

• "How do I find a proper mentor within my company?"
• "Dynamics of 1-on-1 Mentorship"