Mike Garite
AI Agent Architect · Principal Systems Engineer
Force multiplier — autonomous engineering infrastructure.
Twenty years building where the work is hardest to see and least understood — front-end, interaction, prototyping, engineering leadership, and product. I build closed-loop agentic systems: infrastructure that takes a goal and drives it through code, tests, review, and deploy, with people on the edges of the loop instead of trapped inside it. In the Valley I was known for standing up production-grade infrastructure faster than teams thought possible — when agentic AI arrived, that rapid-engineering instinct became the dominant skill. My cross-domain range is the force multiplier that makes autonomous systems ship instead of staying demos.
Selected Work
Execution-Loop
Closed-loop agentic engine. Takes a spec and drives it to a merged PR with no human in the critical path: spec-ready gate → ordered execution → code → tests → PR → CI review → merge. Every step deterministic.
- 10/10 run reliability
- ~0.81 items/min throughput
- 371 ordered work items resolved before tests run
Starship
Autonomous product operating platform — command center for context hydration, multi-agent orchestration, execution queues, agent roles, GitHub flow, and cloud-connected operational visibility. In production.
Context-Brain
Deterministic context-freshness layer. MCP server on GCP Cloud Run with ranked retrieval, a 24-hour TTL, and on-demand refresh — so agents work from the actual current state of the codebase, not stale docs.
Experience
- Founded Midwest to make autonomous engineering loops reliable enough for production — not just demos.
- Designed and built Starship, the autonomous product operating platform: context hydration, multi-agent orchestration, execution queues, GitHub flow, and GCP-deployed MCP servers.
- Run my own product development on the system — Midwest is built using Midwest.
- Built a full product from zero — strategy, design, engineering, infrastructure.
- Shipped multi-persona streaming chat (WebSocket), RAG retrieval over a proprietary dataset, and LangGraph multi-step property analysis on a Next.js / Supabase / OpenAI stack.
- Validated a real-estate market-timing thesis by relocating against the model — and selling at the top.
- Led product strategy, roadmap, and execution across the contextual advertising platform and data products.
- Carried the product through acquisition by Kargo — owning roadmap, managing to a board, and navigating the deal.
- Led engineering teams across platform and product surfaces at professional-sports-media scale: live streams for 30 teams, real-time Statcast data, millions of concurrent users.
- Operated systems where downtime during a World Series game was not an option.
- Worked at the boundary of design systems and engineering — shipped production UI components and prototyped new experiences.
- Prototyped a Facebook Marketplace concept and built across eBay's fashion design system.
- Made complex financial workflows feel simple — high-fidelity interactive prototypes that validated product decisions before engineering spend.
- Forged the rapid-prototyping discipline that now underpins how I design agentic systems: ship the smallest loop that proves the system.
- Designed interaction patterns and implemented them — owned the gap between design intent and live behavior.
- Built the first on-demand radio experience with artist sessions for tens of millions of listeners.
- First product-company engineering role — built front-end product surfaces and learned how engineering, design, and business goals collide in a real company.