Babylist Career Growth & Development

Babylist University allowed me to meet different leaders and key people across different departments. It’s good to have that knowledge from the get-go.

How do you structure mentorship and technical learning for engineers?

I structure mentorship around peer pairing and codebase ownership. I pair each engineer with someone more senior and someone more junior. Both sides benefit. The senior engineer develops mentorship and leadership skills, while the junior engineer learns how to exercise technical judgment, make architectural decisions, and reason through code design. The reciprocity is the point — it’s not a one-way transfer.

Beyond pairing, I create regular opportunities for engineers to present technical topics to the team. Teaching out loud is one of the fastest ways to sharpen your own understanding, and it scales learning across the group. I also encourage every engineer to claim an area of the codebase to develop deep expertise in. That ownership gives them a clear domain to grow into, and it positions them to onboard and mentor new engineers into that area over time.

What internal mobility or upskilling programs have you launched recently?

AI is the defining skill shift of the last few years, and I’d argue effective AI use is one of the most important capabilities an engineer can build right now: how to work with AI tools, orchestrate agents, and integrate them across the software development lifecycle.

On my team, we ran a series of pilots starting with agentic IDEs, then expanded into orchestration tools more recently. The pilots themselves are the upskilling mechanism. Engineers get hands-on exposure to new tooling, and the patterns of who adopts quickly, where workflows break down and what unlocks productivity become findings I share back to managers and the broader engineering org. That feedback loop matters as much as the tools themselves.

How do you identify and support future technical leaders?

I look for three signals: sound judgment, proactivity and the instinct to push the organization forward rather than wait for direction. Those traits show up well before someone has a formal leadership title.

From there, the work is intentional career conversations. I want to know whether someone is targeting staff or management and, increasingly, how they see their path evolving as AI reshapes what those roles look like. That last part matters more than it used to. Some traditional career ladders are being redefined in real time, and engineers need a thought partner to help them figure out where they fit.

Once I understand the path someone is on, I can match them to stretch opportunities that build the specific skills they’ll need next. This is where the leverage compounds: When an IC is genuinely motivated by their own growth trajectory, they self-direct toward it. My job shifts from pushing motivation into clearing obstacles and creating exposure.