Coaches and Mentors for Engineering Managers and Engineering Leaders

I sometimes get asked if I do mentoring for engineering leaders - managers, directors or senior+ engineers. I cover topics relevant to these people in The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter and share actionable advice. Sadly, I have no bandwidth for one-on-one mentoring on top of my writing.

Luckily, I both know several people who specialize in this type of coaching. I also asked around for more recommendations:

Who are some great coaches/mentors for engineering managers and senior eng managers / directors you know of? Asking about people who do external, paid coaching.

I get asked about this every now and then and would love to point to more people who do this.
— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) December 8, 2021

Below is a list of paid coaches for engineering leaders who come recommended - either by myself, or from other people I trust. As an engineering leader, investing in an external coach is a high ROI investment for your company to make. If you don't have access to experienced mentors or coaches within your company, I suggest you make the case for an external engineering coach to maximise your growth and impact.

A word of advice: finding a coach who "clicks" won't happen without talking to a few people. In the past, I've recommended coaches who worked wonderfully for some people, but there was no "chemistry" with others. Do an intro call, and if you feel you're getting on the same wavelength: this is a good sign. If not: it's not a big deal, and talk to someone else.

As usual, I have no affiliation with the below folks – beyond knowing some of them personally – and have not been paid to recommend any of them. For more details, see my ethics statement.

My recommendations

These are people I either personally know, or people I know well shared good experiences with.

Anton Drukh - formerly VP of Engineering, mentor to several tech executives. Based in Israel.
Laura Tacho - VP of engineering and engineering leadership coach. Formerly at Codeship, Cloudbees and well-known in the Docker community. Based in Austria (Vienna).
Lena Reinhard - engineering executive turned coach for engineering leaders and managers. Formerly VP Engineering at CircleCI and TravisCI. Based in Germany (Berlin).
Pat Kua - formerly CTO of N26, author of Level Up Engineering newsletter, creator of Tech Lead Academy. Coaches VP/Director levels. Based in Germany (Berlin).
Edward Taylor – formerly worked with Ed at Skyscanner, where he hired me and was my first manager. He is currently mentoring CTOs, VPEs, EMs and senior engineering managers. In his words: "I have particular experience in mentoring those who have prematurely leapt a few rungs on the leadership ladder, now thrown in at the deep end. Some solid personal experience right there."
Colin Howe - startup CTO. Based in the UK (London).

Further vetted recommendations

The below recommendations came from Twitter, with one or more people sharing good experienced with the people below.

Matan Kubovsky - former CTO, CPO, and VP of Engineering (Portugal / Lisbon.)
Alvaro Moya - experienced CTO, founder of tech leadership training LIDR (Spain / Barcelona).
Aviv Ben-Yosef - mentoring CTOs and VPEs globally for several years (Israel.)
Cate Huston - engineering director at DuckDuckGo, formerly at Google. Coaches managers (Ireland / remote.)
Esther Derby - coach and consultant (US / Minnesota.)
Félix López - VP Engineering, formerly at Eventbrite and Google (Spain.)
Jason Wong - leadership coach, formerly at Sr Director of Engineering at Etsy (US / NYC.)
Joel Chippindale - CTO coach (London.)
Keith Adams - formerly chief architect at Slack, engineer at Facebook, senior staff engineer at VMWare (US / San Francisco.)
Kirsten Clacey - faciliator coach at Automattic (South Africa / Cape Town.)
Lara Hogan - formerly VP of Engineering at Kickstarter, author of the book Resilient Management. Engineering manager coaching - more details (US.)
Raphaela Wrede - engineering leadership coach, formerly engineering leadership at Contentful and Travis CI (Germany / Berlin.)
Rod Begbie - engineering leadership coach, formerly senior EM at Dropbox (Spain / Barcelona.)
Saurya Velagapudi - engineering leadership coach, formerly tech lead manager at Google (Singapore.)
Tony Piper. Mental fitness coach, formerly having worked in the tech industry (UK / London.)

Coaching lists and groups

A list of women in tech coaches curated by coach Lulu Cheng
Best Practicer. 1:1 coaching from domain experts.
CTO Craft. CTO coaching and mentoring.
LIDR - a mentoring program and community.
VPE Coach. Leadership coaching for engineers, by engineers.

Engineering Manager learning circles

An alternative to one-on-one coaching is joining a learning circle for engineering managers. Here are ones I know of, and can recommend:

VPE Learning Circle organized by Will Larson and Uma Chingunde
Down Left organized by Oren Ellenbogen
CTO Craft learning circles

Other places to find mentorship

You can find free or paid mentors on sites listed in these mentoring resources.

Missing someone from these lists? Reply to this thread on Twitter - I update the list based on it.

People formerly on this list

These are people who did coaching in the past, but have stopped, for now.

Paulo André - formerly VP of Engineering and HelloFresh alumni. Mentoring engineering leaders at all levels. Based in Germany (Berlin).

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