# Brendon Garner

Engineering leader. Agentic AI, platform architecture, and product development.

[brendon@11.computer](mailto:brendon@11.computer)

Technical founder and hands-on engineering leader. I built and directly managed a 10+ person engineering organization, and earlier led enterprise delivery across combined internal and client teams of over 50. I designed and built Canopy, a multi-tenant agent operating system, end to end, and personally built all of the agentic capabilities of Podium, a developer platform for agentic commerce. I design systems that teams can maintain and extend while meeting business needs.

## Systems

### Piper: bounded-autonomy agent runtime

*Private independent project. Current.*

- Architected and built a live capital-operations runtime with isolated research and signing processes, import-graph enforcement, and expiring owner-issued grants. Deterministic execution and risk controls bound agent actions; only the owner can expand authority.
- Compiled model proposals into persisted conditions evaluated against a closed feature registry by a deterministic listener. Built supervised entry and exit state machines with risk-based sizing, venue-held protection, and model interventions restricted to closing, reducing, or tightening positions.
- Engineered transactional claims, crash recovery, and compensating workflows across non-atomic external APIs. Reconciled partial fills, changing order identifiers, and uncertain outcomes against venue records, preserving ownership and exact-decimal accounting across automated and human activity.
- Evaluated model interventions against deterministic baseline replays, with paired counterfactual outcomes and day-clustered uncertainty estimates. Retained point-in-time features, publication lags, fleet-wide trial accounting, and independent walk-forward gates for learned-policy promotion.

### Canopy: multi-tenant agent operating system

*KIKI World. Designed and built end to end, from backend orchestration to user-facing applications.*

- Ran hundreds of workflows on independently deployed HTTP/SSE services and BullMQ workers, with Redis admission controls separating interactive, batch, and ingestion work.
- Built conversational and specialist-agent orchestration with bounded tool use, durable sessions, append-only event histories, checkpointing, and reconnect recovery across interruptions and human approval pauses.
- Built hybrid retrieval, progressively loaded skills, and learned memory and planning policies using state-matched evaluation, behavior cloning, advantage-weighted regression, and Bradley-Terry preference modeling. Policy promotion is governed by independent verifiers, backtests, historical replay, and live canaries.
- Integrated MCP tool access and A2A delegation with scoped credentials and recorded authority. Built kernel-isolated environments for generated code, and a separate QuickJS/WASM sandbox for analysis over tenant data without loading bulk rows into model context.
- Governed human-approved and autonomous actions through mandates, spending limits, expiry, kill switches, and atomic publisher claims. Added structured output validation, OpenTelemetry GenAI trajectory checks, and run-level cost accounting.

### Podium: developer platform for agentic commerce

*KIKI World. Led product strategy and engineering delivery; personally built all agentic capabilities.*

- Podium was the platform behind KIKI's community commerce application. I refactored and extended its multi-tenant API (TypeScript, Bun, Elysia, PostgreSQL) and built agentic shopping, memory, checkout, and payment capabilities through OpenAPI, SDK, and MCP interfaces.
- Shipped multiple user-facing agentic applications for beauty, creator-curated shopping, and community commerce, using shared platform services to support distinct workflows and interaction models.
- Engineered a two-phase checkout state machine across native inventory, connectors, and an external commerce provider. Adapter selection is locked at creation and state transitions are enforced; signed webhooks and asynchronous reconciliation recover stalled checkouts and resolve uncertain outcomes.
- Extended Stripe Connect settlement for multi-seller orders with per-merchant payout records, deterministic allocations, database uniqueness constraints, and idempotent transfers, so retries and webhook replays cannot pay out twice.

### Agent harness: agentic engineering systems

*Independent practice.*

- Created a harness for autonomous coding agents that enforces scope boundaries, implementation records, and fail-closed verification before an agent action can proceed.
- Designed agentic engineering workflows spanning architectural decisions, task decomposition, scoped delegation, and third-party surface review mandates. Durable architectural contracts are kept separate from dated implementation evidence, so agents resume work across sessions without conflating intended design with completed work.
- Engineered documentation-drift and import-reachability checks, with a resumable mutation-testing runner that verifies guards against deliberately reintroduced defects. Verification results are bound to code, mutation, and test hashes, so a change invalidates stale proof.
- Reduced repeated agent failures by turning incidents into persistent memory and executable safeguards, with preflight controls that block unsafe test targets.

## Leadership

### KIKI World Inc.: co-founder

*Head of Product and Engineering, May 2022 to September 2026. Chief Executive Officer, April 2025 to September 2026. Los Angeles.*

Led product and engineering from founding across product, engineering, design, and operations. Added CEO responsibilities in April 2025: company strategy, organizational restructuring, fundraising, and delivery.

- Built and directly managed an engineering organization of up to 12 employees and contractors, owning hiring, onboarding, one-to-ones, and delivery across frontend, backend, AI, and integration pods.
- Coached engineers on connecting technical decisions to business needs, matched responsibilities to individual strengths, and developed high-performing engineers into technical leads.
- Reduced the operating budget by approximately 80% while maintaining product delivery. After the restructuring, personally designed and built Canopy and implemented all agentic capabilities of Podium.
- Shaped product and technical strategy, investor materials, and diligence supporting three funding rounds totaling approximately $11M, alongside the founding team and company leadership.

## Earlier

- **Strategic Director, Assignment Studios.** Los Angeles, 2020 to 2022. Advised on product strategy, technology infrastructure design, and cross-functional operating systems for media and software assets under management.
- **Co-founder and Head of Product, Likewise.** Los Angeles, 2019 to 2020. Bootstrapped a platform connecting enterprise clients with freelance talent; acquired by BRANDCO.
- **Co-founder and Head of Strategy, OURS.** Los Angeles, 2015 to 2019. Conceived and launched a curated premium commerce experience for home rentals and design products; customer engagement rose more than 200%.
- **Enterprise Program Manager, then Enterprise Account Executive, ICF Interactive.** Los Angeles, 2011 to 2014. Led enterprise e-commerce programs with internal and client teams of upwards of 50 people across Southeast Asia, Europe, and the United States, for clients including Target, Doosan, and Lids. Directly managed engineers and designers, and partnered with solution architects on planning, scope, and delivery.

## Skills

- **Leadership:** Engineering Management, Technical Strategy & Architecture, Hiring & Team Development, Engineer Coaching & Mentorship, Cross-functional Delivery, Product Strategy & Prioritization, Org Design, Fundraising & Board Position.
- **Agent Systems:** Multi-Agent Orchestration, Durable Execution, Context Engineering, Hybrid Retrieval & Memory, MCP Server & Tools, Execution Sandboxes, Policy Enforcement, Tool-calling, Action Planning, A2A Delegation, Capability-based Auth, Coding Harnesses, Caching.
- **Platform Engineering:** Multi-tenancy, Delegated authorization, Observability & Cost Accounting, Commerce and payments, Transactional concurrency control, Crash recovery & compensating workflows, Observability and tracing, Idempotency and retries, Event-driven architecture, Governed autonomy, Distributed systems.
- **Eval & Learning:** Trajectory Evaluation, Synthetic Data, Preference Modeling, Behavior Cloning, Advantage-weighted Regression, Contextual-bandit Design, Independent Policy Promotion, Point-in-time Eval, Data-leakage Prevention, Regression Suites, Behavior Testing, Statistical Validation.
- **Connectors & Integrations:** API connector development, OAuth integration, Data ingestion & Synchronization, Tenant-scoped credentials, OpenAPI, TypeScript SDK generation, Signed webhooks, Shopify, Google Workspace, WooCommerce, Notion, Klaviyo, Linear, Slack.
- **App & Data Tech:** Bun, Node.js, Elysia, PostgreSQL, Real-time Stream Processing, Redis, Python, Supabase (Storage, Vault, Edge Functions), Prisma, Data Provenance, Zod, Next.js, pgvector, TypeScript, React, WebSockets.
- **AI & Research:** Anthropic API, OpenAI API (Embeddings, Whisper), Firecrawl, Parallel, Browserbase, Stagehand.
- **Infrastructure:** BullMQ, QStash, Docker/Docker Compose, QuickJS/WASM, Vercel, Cloudflare, OpenTelemetry, Stripe Connect, Railway, PostHog, Datadog, Git, GitHub Actions, AWS.

## Education

University of California, Santa Barbara. 2006 to 2010.