As a suggestion for finding mentors, maybe just track down some senior software engineers at OpenAI and the like and drop them a cold email explaining that you're curious and would love some time to chat about how <some new tool they're working on> works?

If you email ten, at least five will probably ignore you, three will say they're too busy, but two might be up for a chat. You lose nothing by asking, and if someone's "offended" or something because they received a cold email... well, that's their problem.

That's the start of a mentoring relationship. The first two probably won't be good AI mentors but you'll have learned something cool, and maybe they're curious about distributed systems. But maybe the second or third or fourth time you repeat this process, you find someone you really click with.