Why did you decide to become a mentor?

Becoming a mentor felt like a natural extension of the work I already love: translating complex technical problems into clear, actionable processes and helping people grow into those responsibilities. Early in my career I benefited massively from a few stretch assignments and candid coaches who gave me space to lead, fail fast, and learn - I want to pay that forward. Mentoring also pushes me to articulate leadership frameworks, refine my communication and test approaches in new contexts. I expected mentoring to be a time commitment and a learning opportunity; it’s turned out to be both and more. Working remotely makes informal sponsorship harder inside a company, so mentoring externally has let me practice building trust at a distance and coaching people through career pivots. Ultimately I mentor because helping someone land their next role or solve a gnarly operational problem is one of the most tangible, energizing returns I get from my experience.

How did you get your career start?

I didn’t come through a classical bootcamp or an academic program - my path was very hands-on. Early roles put me close to operations and release work: I learnt by shipping, by debugging incidents at 2 a.m., and by volunteering to own messy integration points between teams. I had mentors who trusted me with cross-functional problems (security handoffs, environment drift, complex rollouts) and gave me runway to experiment. Over six years at the same company I deepened domain knowledge (cloud fundamentals, security concepts, environment governance) and shifted from being the person who “did the work” to someone who organized the people, processes and metrics that make work repeatable. That practical apprenticeship taught me to read code, understand infrastructure tradeoffs and - most importantly - to build processes that reduce cognitive load for engineers so they can ship confidently.

What do mentees usually come to you for?

Mentees typically seek help with practical career transitions and day-to-day operational leadership. Common asks: what should I learn next; did I pick the right subject at university; how to design a 30–60–90 plan for a new role; how to structure work that actually gets actioned and how to present operational outcomes to senior stakeholders. My mentorship structure is pragmatic and outcome-focused: we agree objectives up front, run short weekly touchpoints (or async check-ins via Discord for remote convenience), and set real deliverables - a stakeholder map, a runbook, a promotion narrative or interview prep. I often pair coaching with “homework” (a one-pager, a mock presentation, or a metrics dashboard) so mentees build artifacts they can use immediately. I also enjoy discussing how to use AI as an accelerant for coding, documentation and repetitive analysis, while emphasizing judgment and communication over tooling alone.

What's been your favourite mentorship success story so far?

One of my favorite stories (before I joined mentorcruise) is a mentee who came to me frustrated: excellent at engineering, but stuck in a role that didn’t scale their influence. Together we mapped a pathway into engineering management: clarified strengths, built a measurable 90-day plan to own a small-but-visible operational domain and rehearsed how to present impact to their manager. Over six months they took stewardship of a critical environment-stability metric, implemented simple automation to reduce manual fixes and used the resulting metric improvements in a promotion packet. They landed a leadership role within the same company and later credited the mentorship process - the deliverables, the stakeholder-simulation calls, and the promotion narrative - as decisive. That outcome illustrates what I enjoy most about mentoring: converting nebulous career anxiety into a tangible plan, measurable progress, and increased confidence.

What are you getting out of being a mentor?

Mentoring keeps me sharp and humble. Teaching others forces me to codify instinctive behaviors - how I triage incidents, delegate or negotiate across orgs - and that reflection improves my day job. It also broadens my perspective: mentees surface new contexts, tools and edge cases that expand my personal playbook. Professionally, mentoring strengthens my communication skills, gives me practice in influencing without authority and builds a network of emerging leaders. Personally, the satisfaction of watching someone grow into a role and knowing I helped clear the path is deeply motivating. Running structured mentoring plans via Discord and occasional 1:1s has become a compact, high-leverage way to invest in others while continuing to scale my own leadership practice.