# Mike Richards

> Mike Richards is a technical founder and hands-on engineer with 15+ years across AI and agent systems, enterprise architecture, product engineering, and technical leadership.

- [Professional profile](https://mikerichards.tech/)
- [Contact Mike](mailto:hi@mikerichards.tech)
- Location: Atlanta, Georgia, United States

## Background and capabilities

For 15+ years, I’ve moved between founder, architect, lead, and hands-on engineer—often in the same week.

- AI & agent systems: Turn capable models into dependable products: agents, tool use, retrieval, evaluation, orchestration, and the software around them.
- Complex product engineering: Take an ambitious, ambiguous idea from whiteboard to production—with the architecture, interfaces, and judgment to make it real.
- Scale & systems design: Design for real-world load, failure, security, and change. I’m comfortable where APIs, data, infrastructure, and users collide.
- Technical leadership: Turn business needs into engineering direction. Shape the architecture, coordinate contributors, and build the foundations—while staying deep in the code.

## Current role

Lead Software Engineer, Warner Bros. Discovery.

At Warner Bros. Discovery, I lead an enterprise AI document intelligence initiative and help shape and build a separate agentic platform—working across product direction, architecture, infrastructure, and hands-on engineering.

## Selected work

### [Warner Bros. Discovery](https://mikerichards.tech/#warner-bros-discovery)

At Warner Bros. Discovery, I turn emerging AI capabilities into practical enterprise software—across product direction, architecture, and hands-on engineering.

#### Document intelligence — Led development & business initiative

I led the business initiative and engineering development of an enterprise AI document intelligence platform—from product direction and technical architecture to hands-on implementation.

Agentic AI, LLM orchestration, RAG, hybrid search, and full-stack engineering.

Product direction, architecture, and hands-on engineering.

#### General-purpose agentic platform — Architecture & platform engineering

Separately, I helped shape and build a reusable agentic platform. I designed foundational architecture, built infrastructure, and developed integration foundations and core platform capabilities.

Architecture, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and extensible AI workflows.

I coordinated engineering across contributors, including engineers building the extensible tool ecosystem.

### [FanBeat](https://mikerichards.tech/#fanbeat)

As technical co-founder of FanBeat, I designed and built a real-time game platform that ran alongside live sporting events. The system was load-tested for millions of simultaneous requests and kept devices synchronized under intense, bursty traffic.

### [FanBeat Daily](https://mikerichards.tech/#fanbeat-daily)

I led the product design and engineering of FanBeat Daily, including a scalable API, responsive web application, and money movement integrations. The work crossed product strategy, UX, infrastructure, and hands-on implementation.

### [The Home Depot](https://mikerichards.tech/#home-depot)

For The Home Depot, I architected and led engineering of a countertop estimator that translated complex product, pricing, and installation data into a useful customer experience—working from early concept through production.

## Previous experience

- FanBeat — Technical Co-Founder
- sendit — Product Engineer
- BLOCKv — iOS Engineer
- AT&T Digital Life — Senior Engineer
- Engauge / Moxie — Innovation Architect