Michael W

• Career track through Moveworks → Palantir → Sandisk shows a consistent deepening in agentic AI and backend systems → suggests someone who goes deep on a discipline rather than rotating across functions.
• Role at Palantir — a company known for high expectations around analytical rigor and real-world deployment — → likely accustomed to environments where systems need to work in production, not just in demos.
• Medium tenure shape across roles → probably moves when the technical problem is solved or the scope stops growing, not for titles alone.
• Specialist role-type pattern across all three employers → likely most engaged when working at the system-design or architecture level, not in generalist or cross-functional management roles.
• Works fully remote → comfortable with async communication and self-directed execution without ambient office structure.
• No public writing signal → tends to do the work quietly rather than building a personal brand around it; unlikely to be motivated by visibility or thought-leadership status.

Openers

• Open on the agentic AI architecture work at Palantir — it's the most distinctive signal in his background, and asking what 'agentic' meant in practice at a company like Palantir (versus how the term gets used generically) will immediately show you've done the work.
• Reference Sandisk's BiCS10 QLC NAND announcement and the data center AI storage buildout — he joined in March 2026, right as the company was posting 233% sequential data center revenue growth; the engineering environment he walked into is unusually high-stakes.
• Bring up Moveworks' approach to enterprise AI automation as a contrast point — moving from an AI-for-employees product to Palantir's decision-intelligence systems to Sandisk's storage infrastructure is a specific arc worth exploring.

Discovery questions

1. At Palantir, 'agentic AI' means something specific — systems making consequential decisions in production. What did that look like in the work you were doing there, and what breaks when you try to generalize that architecture?
2. You joined Sandisk in March 2026, right as the company was spinning out of Western Digital and scaling data center revenue aggressively — what was the engineering environment like on day one, and what's changed in the months since?
3. Moveworks and Palantir are very different deployment contexts for AI. How did moving between them reshape how you think about backend architecture for agentic systems?