About Michael Guthrie

28 years across the stack, the systems, and the strategy.

Former Royal Navy. Enterprise CMS architect. GTM engineer. AI orchestrator. I’ve spent three decades building the infrastructure behind organisations that can’t afford to stop.

The story

From the Navy to the cutting edge of AI.

I started my career in the Royal Navy — an environment where systems either work or people get hurt. That instilled a discipline around documentation, handoffs, and operational reliability that I’ve carried into every digital project since.

From there I moved into enterprise content management — building repository platforms, migrating institutional archives, and designing the knowledge infrastructure that academic and government organisations depend on. The WHO IRIS project (1M+ records) was the largest of these, but the pattern repeated across KnowledgeArc, the Royal Navy’s Sea Your History archive, and BDF.

Over the past five years I’ve layered in the growth side — GTM engineering, outbound infrastructure, and now AI orchestration. The common thread is systems thinking: understanding how the whole thing fits together before touching a single piece of it.

I’m based in Brighton, UK. I work remotely and on-site with teams across Europe and North America.

What I do

Four practice areas, one systems mindset.

01

GTM Engineering

Multi-inbox outbound systems, sequence architecture, deliverability, and personalisation at scale.

02

AI Orchestration

Claude Code, MCP agents, and GPT-4 workflows wired into real ops — lead research, content ops, internal tooling.

03

CMS Architecture

WordPress and headless builds — migration strategy, editorial workflow design, platform governance.

04

Knowledge Systems

Institutional repositories, metadata schema, and knowledge management platforms built for discoverability.

How I operate

A few things I believe strongly.

  • 01
    Context beats process. I learn how your team operates before proposing changes. The best system is the one your team will actually run.
  • 02
    Shipping beats planning. Discovery phases that bill at day rate without producing anything are a tax. I’d rather ship a working v1 in week two than a roadmap in week four.
  • 03
    Clean exits are the goal. My job is to make myself unnecessary. Everything I build gets documented, trained on, and handed over — no black-box systems, no vendor lock-in.
  • 04
    Boring infrastructure is good infrastructure. The exciting technology is in the layer above the platform. The platform should be dull, stable, and maintainable at 2am.

Ready to work together?

Q3 2026 capacity is available. Book a call to discuss your project.

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See my work