Mike Garon

VP of Engineering

Cobalt

Mar 2025 - Current (1 year 8 months)

I lead a 32-person engineering and data organization building Cobalt’s human-led, AI-powered offensive security platform. My work spans customer workflows, offensive tooling, data systems, platform orchestration, and AI-assisted pentesting. In Q2 2026, we used AI deliberately rather than cosmetically: delivery grew 70% year over year by story points and 72% by PRs merged, average PR cycle time improved, and change failure rate stayed flat. I focus on clear ownership, practical engineering systems, and making AI useful in real delivery work.

VP of Engineering

Future

Oct 2024 - Mar 2025 (6 months)

We rewarded consumers for climate-positive purchasing behavior and helped partners turn sustainability into measurable customer engagement

Head of Engineering

Future

Nov 2023 - Oct 2024 (1 year)

F

Co-Founder and CTO

Fan Rewards

Jun 2021 - Nov 2023 (2 years 6 months)

Acquired in 2023.

Co-founded a company to change how creators connect to their most devoted fans. We brought sincerity and IRL rewards to fans who engaged with creator content. Built a team of 13 people, including 6 engineers. Managed process to reliably deliver product features to satisfy business requirements. Built the foundational team and full-stack application, most of which continued to operate for years of sustained growth beyond 40k active users:
• Infrastructure as Code on AWS using CDK
• RESTful API using Flask, Python, Alembic, and SQLAlchemy
• Database schema (including diagrams in Mermaid)
• Mobile application for iOS using Swift
• Admin application using React
• Async tasks using Lambd

CTO

Knoq

Jan 2020 - Jun 2021 (1 year 6 months)

Acquired in 2021.

Knoq is a technology company that encourages people to talk to their neighbors. Our technology recruits, trains and guides neighborhood representatives (Knoqers) to go out into their own neighborhoods and talk to people about products and services that can make their lives better. Our platform has been used by Google Fiber, NRG, Inspire Energy, Fluent Home Security and many other direct-to-home brands. We are growing 500% YoY and are hiring 200+ people this year. We are backed by Haystack VC, Initialized, Liquid2, Fathom Capital and Background Capital.

● Converted a feature factory team into a product team
● Implemented a process that democratized access to product decisions
● Increased tea

Head of Engineering

Flare Jewelry

Nov 2017 - Nov 2019 (2 years 1 month)

Acquired 2023.

Flare puts secret buttons into fashion jewelry so that people can get out of situations when they are uncomfortable. Press once for a call, hold for friends. This is a consumer electronics product with a cloud-based software stack, a global supply chain, and a domestic assembly process.

Time Magazine named it one of the Best Inventions of 2020:
https://time.com/collection/best-inventions-2020/5911442/flare-safety-jewelry/

Wired named it the best safety wearable in 2021:

Senior Manager

Carbon Black Inc

May 2015 - Nov 2017 (2 years 7 months)

Acquired 2019.

I joined Carbon Black when it acquired Objective Logistics in May 2015.

As a team leader, I crafted a culture of developer trust, empowerment and ownership. I
reinforced that culture by applying an agile process that consistently delivered
measurable progress and customer value over time. I organized frequent conversations
between the team and customers to ensure that we solved their most pressing usability
and domain-specific problems. I orchestrated (and helped implement) the transition of a
legacy Backbone application into a modern, fast, and scalable React application. I
encouraged knowledge sharing and mentoring within the team. In 2016, I was nominated
for and com

O

Principal Software Engineer

Objective Logistics

Apr 2013 - May 2015 (2 years 2 months)

Acquired 2015.

Worked with an all-star team to change the way restaurants operate and to make life
better for their employees. For me, that meant full stack development on a cloud-based
web application.

My work included writing business logic in C#, RESTful APIs and UIs. We used responsive
design and progressive enhancement to support client devices with different capabilities.
I also worked with the team to improve our development process and tools, eg Jira
administration, automated code coverage and maintaining our definition of done. That
included writing SQL scripts and tools to improve productivity for sales engineers.

Objective Logistics was acquired by Carbon Black

A

Sr Software Engineer

Apperian

Feb 2012 - Apr 2013 (1 year 3 months)

Full stack web development with a twist of mobile thrown in! I worked with a great team on Apperian's core products. That meant updating the database schema, writing web services, consuming the web services from a dynamic admin site and from native mobile clients. I also worked with product managers to design user flows and specific user interfaces for web and mobile. I can't disclose technical details, but I can drop some names: Backbone.js, Twitter Bootstrap, RESTful APIs, Python, Java for Android, Objective C for iOS. Fun!

Software Engineer

Demiurge Studios

Jun 2008 - Jan 2012 (3 years 8 months)

Worked with an amazing team of engineers, artists, designers and testers to make a wide range of video games. Started as an individual contributor, worked hard and made some powerful memories as a Lead Engineer working with 10 other engineers. Contributed to the company's in-house game engine. Helped define the company's strategy for dealing with localization, including building a browser-based localization tool that streamlined the process of getting string translations into games. Worked with artists, designers and producers to make game UIs.

Engineer - Shoot Many Robots
Lead Engineer - Rock Band Country Track Pack 2
Engineer - Unannounced title
Lead Engineer - Green Day: Rock Band
Engineer - Rock Band Metal

Director of Software Engineering (promoted from Lead Engineer)

Sensicast Systems Inc

Jul 2005 - May 2008 (2 years 11 months)

I was hired to build web applications and ended up doing much more. After a brief ramp-up time doing traditional web development, I designed a new embedded appliance to manage wireless sensor networks. The design process started with gathering requirements and identifying COTS components to meet them.

I then led a team through the design, implementation and maintenance of the embedded device. On the hardware side, that meant assembling prototypes, testing communication and other functional performance, selecting enclosures, etc. On the software side, that meant writing the database schema plus the APIs and UIs to interact with it.

I trained team members on how to assemble the devices quickly. We once had a party in wh

M

Software Engineer

Mercantila

Jul 2004 - Apr 2005 (10 months)

Core web development with an emphasis on large data sets

M

Software Engineer and Co-Founder

Mirus Technologies Inc

Sep 1999 - Jul 2004 (4 years 11 months)

Designed and implemented standalone, distributed and web-enabled applications. Helped deliver groundbreaking data storage hardware diagnostics, wireless telemetry applications and mobile phone entertainment.

Co-founded startup company with Cornell professor during academic year. Licensed software to commercial partners. Sold company to licensee in 1998. Reverse engineered communication protocols and implemented software to ease manipulation of hardware devices. Developed proof of concept software platform to control data storage robots remotely over networks.

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Mike Garon

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