Mendral

AI DevOps Engineer

Founding DevRel

$150K - $200KSan Francisco, CA, US
Job type
Full-time
Role
Product
Experience
3+ years
Visa
US citizen/visa only
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Sam Alba
Sam Alba
Founder

About the role

Mendral is The AI DevOps Engineer. Three always-on agents handle security, reliability, and performance, plus custom automations for anything else specific to your stack. From the team behind Docker and Dagger (YC W19).

We run in production at PostHog, Metabase, Luminai, Inngest, Clipboard Health, Blaxel, among others. Across millions of CI jobs, 73% of failures auto-match to known issues. PostHog accepted 104 fixes from Mendral in a single month.

The Role

We're looking for an engineer who writes. Someone who can sit in our codebase, understand how the agents work, and publish the kind of technical posts that other engineers actually read and share. We're not hiring a marketer. We're hiring an engineer whose job is to make other engineers smarter about CI, agents, and DevOps. Pipeline follows from great content. We're not asking you to measure it, build funnels around it, or chase attribution.

What you'll work on

  • Technical blog posts that earn the front page of HN. Examples we've shipped: "We gave terabytes of CI logs to an LLM" (226 points), "What CI Actually Looks Like at a 100-Person Team," "Anatomy of a Production AI Agent."
  • Conference talks. DevOpsDays, KubeCon, AI engineering events, anywhere senior engineers go to hear from peers.
  • Meetups. Attending, speaking, hanging out with practitioners and bringing back what they're actually struggling with.
  • Open-source contributions and code samples. Small, sharp repos that demonstrate ideas from our posts.
  • Product demos. Recorded for the site, live for engineering teams who want a deeper look at the system.
  • Customer engineering deep-dives. Working with teams at PostHog, Metabase, and others to write about real implementations at scale.
  • Community presence on HN, Reddit, and X. Engaging engineer-to-engineer, not broadcasting.

What we're looking for

  • Engineering background. You've written code in production. You can read a CI log, reason about a flaky test, and write about it without translation help from us.
  • Strong technical writer. You have public examples we can read. Blog posts, RFCs, postmortems, OSS docs.
  • Speaker or aspiring speaker. You've given talks before, or you want to. Comfortable on camera and on stage without three weeks of prep.
  • Curious about the stack. You find agent architecture, CI internals, and infrastructure interesting on their own terms, not as marketing surface.
  • High agency. You're the first hire in this seat. Nobody is briefing you. You're the brief.

Why now

Seed-funded with named customers shipping fixes from Mendral every day. Founders who built Docker and Dagger and write engineer-first content themselves. We've already had multiple HN front-page posts. Your job is to make that the norm, not the exception. You'll be one of the first full-time hires, and the equity reflects that.

Based in the SF Bay Area is preferred, or remote in a compatible timezone.

About Mendral

Mendral is The AI DevOps Engineer. Three always-on agents handle security, reliability, and performance, plus custom automations for anything else specific to your stack. From the team behind Docker and Dagger.

CI was built for humans. AI coding tools now generate hundreds of PRs a day per team, and traditional pipelines can't keep up. Flaky tests, slow builds, supply chain risk, noisy alerts: all of it lands on the engineers who least want to be looking at it. Mendral handles that work autonomously, so shipping isn't gated on humans staring at CI.

We're two engineers who spent the last decade building developer infrastructure. Sam was Docker's first hire and VP of Engineering, scaling the team from 3 to 100+. Andrea authored Docker's first commit. We co-founded Dagger (YC W19) with Solomon Hykes, then started Mendral (YC W26) to solve the reliability problem we kept hitting at every team we worked with.

Today Mendral runs in production at PostHog, Metabase, Luminai, Inngest, Clipboard Health, Blaxel among others. Across millions of CI jobs, 73% of failures auto-match to known issues. PostHog accepted 104 fixes from Mendral in a single month. Anyshift pinned the safe Trivy version two weeks before the supply chain attack, so they didn't have to rotate keys across their infra.

Mendral
Founded:2025
Batch:W26
Team Size:2
Status:
Active
Location:San Francisco
Founders
Sam Alba
Sam Alba
Founder
Andrea Luzzardi
Andrea Luzzardi
Founder