[DonRotolo]

Hiring a professional mentor would be challenging; unless it is a full-time job for most or all of the year, most professionals could not justify taking it. Exceptions are the retired or the unemployed.

If the school doesn't have the talent you prefer, the next logical approach is to contact your sponsors; tell them the need you have and the budget you can afford, they might be able to assign one of their professionals to mentor.

Other schools, both Secondary and Post-secondary, are good sources of talent, and they often have schedules that might allow an employee to mentor the team. Contact the administration of everything within 20 miles and see if they'll allow you to try to recruit someone.

Of course, before you even start: Write up a job description. The mentor will need to know your expectations, and you'll need some objective requirements that someone needs to meet to even be considered, and then later for their 'performance review'. Be flexible here: Do they really need an engineering doctorate, or just equivalent experience? (They DO need to be able to pass a background check though...)