We've been fixing CI since before AI made it worse.
Our Story
Where we started
In 2018, Julien Danjou and Mehdi Abaakouk were tired of watching developers waste hours on pull request management and CI failures. They'd been contributing to open-source infrastructure projects for years, so they built a small automation tool to fix it for their own teams. It struck a chord. What started as a side project turned into a product, then a company.
Where we're going
CI/CD was already slow and expensive back then. Now, with AI coding assistants generating more pull requests than ever, the problem is accelerating. More code means more CI runs, more merge conflicts, more flaky tests, more wasted compute. We're building for a world where code ships faster than any human could review alone.
The Team
A small team of engineers and one designer, spread across France and the Netherlands. We work remotely, ship constantly, and meet up quarterly to cook, debate, and occasionally agree on things. Here's what we care about:
Openness & Ownership
Everyone at Mergify has a voice and the autonomy to make things happen. We take responsibility for what we build, and we question how things are done.
Efficiency & Simplicity
We aim for boring solutions, avoid unnecessary complexity, and ship iteratively. We care more about what works than what's shiny.
Collaboration & Communication
We embrace asynchronous work and default to transparency. Good ideas can come from anywhere, and context is key to good decisions.
Inclusion & Well-being
Great work happens when people feel safe, trusted, and respected. We meet quarterly for retreats, cook together, debate ideas, and have fun along the way.
Julien Danjou
Founder & CEOJulien writes Python books, builds open-source projects that end up on Mars, smokes meat like a pitmaster, ranks in the top 1% of FPS players, and still finds time to run a startup. He became the youngest Debian developer in 2002 and has contributed to Emacs, Python, OpenStack, and more projects than he can count.
Mehdi Abaakouk
Founder & CTOMehdi is a swing-dancing engineer from Toulouse who brings the same rhythm to system architecture. He's contributed to OpenStack, Python, Ceph, and most things that run on servers and matter. He went from bootstrapping startups to scaling Mergify's infrastructure, and he does both with an unsettling level of calm.
Frank Lagendijk
Product DesignerFrank has been tinkering with design since he was 14 and built the Mergify dashboard from scratch. A decade of product design across venture-backed SaaS companies taught him that the best interface is the one you don't notice. He works from Utrecht and has opinions about whitespace.
Alexandre Gaubert
Software EngineerAlex is a frontend engineer from Brittany who turns Figma mockups into pixel-perfect TypeScript like it's a warm-up set. When he's not bending CSS to his will, he's either walking his dogs or lifting something heavier than your average webpack config. Strong code, strong biceps.
Julian Maurin
Software EngineerJulian is meticulous about code the way some people are meticulous about watch movements. He likes clean abstractions, well-tested edge cases, and systems that do exactly what they're supposed to. Quietly productive, consistently reliable.
Thomas Berdy
Software EngineerCo-founded a startup and shipped open source packages on PyPI while running his own consulting practice. Thomas has been writing Python backends for nearly a decade. When he's not deep in async systems and PostgreSQL, he's probably tinkering with CLI tools or data pipelines.
Distributed By Design
We've worked remotely since day one. Coming from open-source communities, async collaboration and written communication are how we've always operated. It's comfortable, and it works.
Our team is spread across Europe, and we organize around flexibility and trust. We take ownership, communicate openly, and show up when it matters. We also know remote work can get isolating, so we make space to connect: casual chats, quarterly retreats, and too many food photos in Slack.
Move faster. Break less.
Purpose-built for teams who take delivery speed and reliability seriously.
