Michael Gifford-Santos

Michael Gifford-Santos

AI / founding product engineer

I build AI products end to end — the agents, the infrastructure, the interface, and the brand.

Seattle — relocating to the SF Bay Area

imagine.
See the work

Built and operating

All work, including Drydock, GentlePrep, Span and E Pluribus →

15+ statesschools served, on a team that never exceeded two engineers
#8 → 100+joined Center as engineer eight; left past a hundred people
~15services operated, with runbooks and written postmortems
4apps live in the App Store and Google Play

How I work

Design, code, business — the triple threat is the point. The fundamentals come from years of shipping; the speed comes from orchestrating AI agents that build, test, and validate, recursively. The stack is whatever the problem needs.

Product design · Brand identity · UI/UX · Full-stack & mobile · Voice interfaces · Distributed systems · AI-orchestrated development

Previously

  1. 2021–24

    Ordo — founding engineer & first hire

  2. 2020–21

    Ensembl — full-stack engineer

  3. 2017–20

    Center — senior SDE, Center Expense · acquired by American Express

  4. 2012–17

    Dodecki — founder & CEO