DevOps for AI Startups

Your AI product just got traction.
Don't let your infra kill the momentum.

Most AI startups are one traffic spike away from disaster. I help founders fix their infrastructure before it becomes the reason they lose users — fast deploys, zero downtime, and a stack that scales.

50%
Faster build times delivered
0
Downtime on production migrations
100%
Observability — metrics, logs & traces
The Problem

Infrastructure debt hits hardest
at your best moment

AI startups move fast and build for now. Then a launch goes viral, a tweet blows up, or you close a big deal — and suddenly the cracks appear.

🔥

Downtime at exactly the wrong time

You hit Product Hunt, land on the front page, and your servers go down. Users leave, investors screenshot the error page. The best moment of your company becomes a PR disaster.

"We had 3,000 signups waiting and our API was returning 503s for 40 minutes."
😰

Every deploy feels like gambling

No rollback strategy. No canary. One bad push and production is on fire. Shipping new features starts to feel more risky than not shipping — so velocity dies.

"We had to wake up the CTO at 3am to manually roll back a deploy."
📊

You're flying blind in production

No observability means you learn about problems from users, not dashboards. By the time you know something's wrong, 10% of your users have already given up and left.

"We found out our inference latency doubled from a user's tweet, not our monitoring."
How It Works

From broken to bulletproof
in weeks, not months

A structured process — no lengthy onboarding, no discovery theater. We start with what matters most and move fast.

01

Free 30-Min Call

Tell me about your stack, your traffic patterns, and what keeps you up at night. I'll tell you what I typically find at your stage and whether I can help — no pitch, no pressure.

No commitment required
02

Scale Readiness Audit

In one week, I do a deep review of your entire infrastructure — cloud, containers, CI/CD, database, observability. You get a written report: what breaks at 10x traffic, and a prioritized fix list.

$750 · 1 week · Applies as credit
03

Fix What Matters First

We tackle the highest-risk items immediately — the things that will break under real load. Quick wins first, then systematic hardening of the full stack.

Results in days, not months
04

Ongoing Partnership (Optional)

Most clients move to a monthly retainer — I become your fractional DevOps engineer, owning the infra so your team can focus on the product. Cancel anytime.

Month-to-month · No contracts
Services

Everything your infra needs
to handle real scale

I don't just advise — I build, deploy, and hand you something that works. Senior-level execution with no account managers between us.

Scalability Architecture

Kubernetes setup designed to handle 10x your current traffic. Auto-scaling, load balancing, pod disruption budgets — built to survive the spike.

Kubernetes AWS GCP HPA/VPA
🔭

Full Observability Stack

See problems before your users do. Complete metrics, logs, and distributed tracing — connected and making sense, not just running in the background.

Prometheus Grafana Loki Tempo OpenTelemetry
🚀

Safe Deploy Pipelines

Ship with confidence. Canary deployments, feature flags, instant rollbacks. Your team goes from dreading deploys to doing them multiple times a day.

Canary GitOps CI/CD ArgoCD
🛡

High Availability

Multi-AZ deployments, database failover, disaster recovery runbooks. A single failure — hardware, zone, or region — should never take you down.

Multi-AZ RDS HA Failover DR
💸

Cloud Cost Optimization

Most AI startups at your stage are overpaying by 30–40%. I find the waste, right-size resources, and implement spending guardrails before the CFO asks.

AWS Cost Explorer Spot Instances Reserved
📐

Infrastructure as Code

Everything reproducible, version controlled, reviewable. No more "snowflake" servers, no undocumented configs, no "only Alex knows how this works."

Terraform Helm Nomad GitOps
Real Results

Outcomes that show up
on the dashboard

Every engagement is measured by what changes in production — not deliverables, not hours, not recommendations.

50%
Faster build times
Cut CI/CD pipeline duration in half across all microservices — same codebase, half the wait.
0
Downtime on migration
Migrated an entire company from VMs to Kubernetes — services stayed live throughout.
Full
Observability from scratch
Built a complete Prometheus + Grafana + Loki + Tempo + OTel stack — zero to full coverage.
Safe
Canary deploys shipped
Implemented canary releases so the team could ship to production without holding their breath.
Get Started

Not sure where your infra
will break? Start here.

The audit is designed to give you clarity in one week — no fluff, just a prioritized list of what to fix and why.

Scale Readiness Audit
Know exactly what breaks at 10x traffic
$750 / one-time
In one week I'll review your full stack and deliver a written report: every single point of failure, what breaks first under load, and a prioritized fix list with effort estimates.
  • Full infrastructure review — cloud, containers, CI/CD, DB
  • Every single point of failure identified
  • Prioritized fix list with estimated effort per item
  • 30-min walkthrough call of all findings
  • Full credit toward any retainer engagement
Get the Audit →
Who this is for
You're a good fit if...
You're an AI startup with real traction
Users are using it. Now you need the infra to match.
You're scaling but infra isn't your team's strength
Your engineers are great at product — infra is the gap.
You can't justify a full-time DevOps hire yet
Senior DevOps expertise without the $200k salary.
A big launch or growth moment is coming
Better to know your weak points before the spike, not during.
Pricing

Simple, transparent pricing

Start with the audit to find the gaps. Move to a retainer to fix them and stay ahead. No long-term contracts — ever.

Starter
$750 / one-time
The right first step. Know exactly what to fix before spending more money or time.
  • Full infrastructure review
  • Single points of failure identified
  • Prioritized fix list + effort estimates
  • 30-min findings walkthrough call
  • Credit toward any retainer
Get the Audit
Dedicated
$7,000 / month
Fractional DevOps engineer. Full ownership, daily availability — cheaper than a full-time hire.
  • Unlimited hours (within reason)
  • Daily availability
  • Full infra ownership & roadmap
  • Priority incident response (<1hr SLA)
  • Direct line — call or Slack anytime
  • Quarterly infra strategy review
Let's Talk

All plans are month-to-month. Cancel anytime. No surprise fees.

👨‍💻

I'm Mendi — a DevOps engineer
who's also been a founder.

I've built a startup from zero. That means I've also built the entire cloud infrastructure from scratch, made every cost tradeoff myself, and felt what it's like when something breaks at 2am with users waiting and investors watching.

I know the pressure. The speed. The "we'll fix it later" decisions that pile up until they explode on your best day. That's exactly why I built SurgeOps — because when your infra is on fire, you don't need a consultant who's never shipped anything. You need someone who's been in your seat.

On the engineering side: full VM-to-Kubernetes migrations, observability stacks built from scratch, CI/CD pipelines that let teams ship without fear, and SRE programs I've designed and taught to 20+ engineers — all in production, zero downtime.

AWS Kubernetes Terraform Prometheus Grafana OpenTelemetry Loki Tempo Nomad ArgoCD Helm CI/CD

Ready to stop worrying
about your infrastructure?

Free 30-minute call. I'll ask about your stack, show you what I usually find at your stage, and we'll figure out if working together makes sense. No pitch, no pressure.

Book a Free 30-Min Call →