For engineering leaders
Your engineers have on-call for production.Nobody’s on call for them.
An on-call coach for your engineering org. Someone your engineers can book within 48 hours when something is live: a hard conversation, a post-incident spiral, a career fork, the quiet “am I still relevant” hum since AI started writing the code.
Former engineering manager at Wave, ex-Mapbox. ICF-accredited coach training. Based in San Francisco.
The case, before anything else
Two in three employees are burned out at least sometimes. The burned-out ones are 2.6 times more likely to be job hunting. Replacing one costs between half and twice their salary.
A Standard retainer is $36,000 a year. One senior engineer staying is the whole return.
Gallup, from a study of 7,500 full-time employees.
The pressure on engineering teams right now is unusual
Everyone is upskilling while shipping
AI is rewriting what “senior engineer” means, and your people are absorbing that privately, at 11pm, on their own. A study of 442 developers found that adopting generative AI raises burnout by increasing job demands — and that what offsets it is job resources: support people can actually reach. A learning stipend is not that.
You find out when it’s too late
A high performer is usually three weeks from resigning before anyone notices. Quiet disengagement is expensive and invisible, and by the time it reaches you the decision is already made.
What you see
- A staff engineer who has stopped arguing in design reviews
- A tech lead you promoted six months ago who has started avoiding 1:1s
- Someone who came back from a bad incident and has not been the same since
- Your strongest IC turned down the management track and won’t say why
- Two seniors who quietly route around each other, and the roadmap pays for it
- The person who used to pick up the hard problems and now waits to be asked
How on-call coaching works
- 1
You buy a block of hours each month. That’s the retainer.
- 2
Engineers book directly. Confidential, within 48 hours, no manager approval needed.
- 3
Sessions are practical. Every one ends in a specific next action, not insight for its own sake.
- 4
You get a monthly note on utilization and themes. Never on content.
What they bring
- Prep before a hard 1:1, skip-level, or performance conversation
- Decompression after an incident or a brutal retro
- Staff track vs management, or being stuck after choosing wrong
- AI-driven role anxiety and identity churn
- Burnout early warning, before it becomes a resignation
- Wave
- Mapbox
- 10Clouds
- Institute for Coaching Mastery (ICF accredited)
Why an engineer-turned-coach, not a generalist
I spent ten years as a software engineer and engineering manager, most recently leading the developer experience team at Wave, Francophone Africa’s first unicorn. Before that, Mapbox and 10Clouds, backend and infrastructure. I know what an incident retro feels like, what a re-org does to a team, and what it costs to ask for help in a culture that prizes self-sufficiency. Your engineers won’t have to explain their world to me.
I work below the strategy layer, where most blocks actually live. Your senior IC already knows they should push back on scope. The question is why they can’t. That is the other half of what I trained for: a year at the Institute for Coaching Mastery, an ICF-accredited program working across mindset, emotional, behavioral and somatic layers, plus Positive Intelligence coaching.
Pricing
Priced per block of availability, not per session used. Invoiced monthly in advance.
Pilot
Start here8 hours / month
$2,400 / mo
Two months, for 2 to 4 engineers. At the end of month two you’ll have utilization, themes, and a decision.
Book a 20-min callEmbedded
40 hours / month
$9,000 / mo
100 plus. Includes one monthly manager group session.
Book a 20-min callThe arithmetic
- $36,000
- A Standard retainer, per year
- 0.5–2× salary
- What Gallup puts the cost of replacing one employee at, calling that a conservative estimate — it counts recruiting, ramp, and the work that slips while the seat is empty
- 1
- How many of those it has to prevent to pay for itself
Substitute your own band. A senior engineer in the Bay Area is rarely under $200,000, so at Gallup’s conservative end a single save still covers the retainer nearly three times over. Prevent none, and your engineers still had somewhere to take the quiet “am I still relevant” hum before it hardened into a resignation.
Sources
- Gallup — Employee Burnout, Part 1: The 5 Main Causes (7,500 employees)
- Gallup — This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion
- Feng, Afroz & Sarma (2026) — From Gains to Strains: Modeling Developer Burnout with GenAI Adoption, ICSE-SEIS (442 developers)
- Theeboom, Beersma & van Vianen (2014) — Does coaching work? A meta-analysis, Journal of Positive Psychology (18 studies)
- Jones, Woods & Guillaume (2016) — The effectiveness of workplace coaching: a meta-analysis, JOOP (17 studies)
Unused hours roll over one month, up to 25%. Overage at $300/hr. Three-month minimum after the pilot. Workshops and offsites quoted separately.
Questions engineering leaders ask
Is this therapy?
No. Coaching works on what’s live now and ends in action. When something needs a therapist, I say so and refer out to a network of practitioners I trust.
Will you tell me what my engineers say?
No. You get a monthly note on utilization and broad themes. Individual content stays with the engineer, and booking is confidential from managers — including from you. That confidentiality is what makes people book.
Do engineers need manager sign-off to book?
No. They get a link and use it. Removing the approval step is most of the value.
Remote or in person?
Remote by default. In-person available in San Francisco for the Embedded tier.
Are you ICF certified?
My training is ICF accredited and I’m completing the final hours for the ACC credential. The pilot exists so you can judge on results rather than on letters.
Does coaching actually work?
Two meta-analyses of workplace coaching — one of 18 studies, one of 17 — find consistent positive effects on wellbeing, work attitudes and performance. The effects are moderate, not dramatic, and I would not ask you to buy this on the literature alone. The pilot exists so you can judge it on your own people instead.
What size company is this for?
Best fit is engineering orgs of 20 to 150 that are absorbing AI-driven role change and can’t afford to lose senior people.
Start with a 20-minute call
No deck. We’ll look at what’s happening on your team and whether a pilot makes sense.
Or email hello@justinalydia.com