Founding Engineer
Mendral · San Francisco, CA, US
Job Description
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 our a full-time engineer who thinks and operates like a co-founder. Someone who understands what we're building, why it matters, and can make high-quality technical decisions without waiting for direction.
You'll own large surface areas of the product and infrastructure. You'll ship fast. You'll make architectural choices that pay off for years. The expectation isn't to write every line of code yourself. It's to make the right calls on what gets built, how, and why.
What you'll work on
- Agent architecture and orchestration across hundreds of concurrent CI runs
- Multi-model routing across Anthropic and OpenAI, picking the right model per task
- The log ingestion pipeline (ClickHouse, billions lines of log ingested per week) that powers agent investigations
- Sandboxed execution, where each agent gets a full dev environment
- New agents (custom automations, security workflows, performance analyses) and the framework they share
- The GitHub App, Slack, and the integrations layer pulling signal from infrastructure (Datadog, Sentry, GCP, AWS, etc…)
What we're looking for
- Builder mindset. You've shipped real products, not just features. You've made hard tradeoffs with incomplete information and lived with the consequences.
- AI-native workflow. You actively use AI coding agents every day. You understand prompt engineering, context management, and running multiple agent instances in parallel.
- Taste over volume. We care more about architecture decisions, system design, and technical judgment than lines of code.
- CI/CD and infrastructure fluency. Real experience with GitHub Actions, CI pipelines, containers, and cloud infrastructure.
- High agency. You enjoy a high level of autonomy and know how to use it.
Why now
Seed-funded with named customers in production. Founders with a decade of DevOps experience (Docker, Dagger). You'll be one of the first full-time hire, and the equity reflects that.
Based in the SF Bay Area is preferred, or remote in a compatible timezone.
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