Mike Harty

mike@portfolio:~ — zsh

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Mike Harty

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Staff software engineer in Santa Monica. I work on high-scale distributed systems and the infrastructure behind real-time video and AI.

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Real-time video and AI infrastructure across edge, local, and cloud.

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Backend platforms and media pipelines for systems millions of people touch. Mostly video, mostly at scale.

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go · rust · typescript · python · c++

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github linkedin email

mike@portfolio:~/work — zsh

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real‑time AI inference, media pipelines, and architecture tuned for scale.

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2025 → Founder, principal engineer

Distributed media and AI pipelines. Real-time video, multimodal inference, and the orchestration layer that lets agents reach the world.

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2024–25 Staff engineer — streaming

Rebuilt a large‑scale video encoding pipeline around ML‑driven quality metrics (VMAF, SSIMulacra2, Butteraugli). Re‑encoded over a million assets, reduced file sizes 10–80%, and cut storage and bandwidth costs by an estimated $2–3M annually.

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2023–24 Staff engineer — live media

Built and operated backend services for live linear channels: playout scheduling, ad insertion, DRM, and ingest. Decomposed a Rails monolith into containerized services, improving release velocity and observability across global content sources.

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2022–23 Software architect

Led service decomposition and API design for an analytics platform on GCP/BigQuery, optimizing hypergraph queries to cut costs by 20%. Earlier in the year, architected a blockchain‑based royalty and payments platform on Algorand, including a Python/Django backend and a real‑time contract indexer.

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2021–22 Engineering leadership — video platform

Led 20 engineers across global teams responsible for live and live‑playout video, coordinating roadmaps and 24/7 availability. Reduced on‑call pages 25% through process changes and observability work. Earlier, drove auto‑transcription, chunked transcoding, and automated clipping from prototype to production.

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2019–21 Staff engineer — platform & auth

Migrated customer and employee authentication onto OAuth 2.0, including a Rust‑based authorization server bridging legacy systems. Previously led organizational adoption of a hosted, managed event‑driven architecture on AWS MSK.

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2018–19 Staff engineer — video infra

Invented Live Redundancy — automatic failover between synchronized live streams across availability zones and regions. Built ingest with forward error correction and SCTE‑35 ad signaling, and implemented broadcast signal decoders bridging IP and traditional broadcast workflows. US 11,196,785 B2

~/work $ cat before.md

<2018 The earlier years

Around a decade across distributed systems, cloud encoding at scale, reliability, deploy pipelines, and developer tooling — including engineering leadership of full‑stack teams and consulting for enterprise clients on large‑scale content and cloud migrations.

~/work $ echo $TOOLBOX

go · rust · typescript · python · c++ · aws · gcp · k8s · kafka · postgres

mike@portfolio:~/things — zsh

~/things $ ls

mikeharty.com/ esphome-pinout/ cronify/ applied/ diffractor/ translated.mov/

~/things $ for d in */; do cat "$d/README.md"; done

web mikeharty.com

The rain is real.

vscode esphome pinout

Renders ESPHome board previews inline with pinouts, assignments, and pin warnings — so wiring and rewiring is easy.

rs cronify

A tiny Rust utility that turns natural language into cron entries.