ABSTRACT The continued evolution of antimicrobial resistance emphasizes the dire need for discovery of antibiotic therapeutics with novel mechanisms of action. Technological advances in genome sequencing, drug library creation, and structural informatics have not advanced infectious disease treatments sufficiently. While natural products have long served as inspiration for novel therapeutic scaffolds, we posit peptide-derived entities offer great potential to address current needs due to their unique mechanisms of action, penetration and selectively. Herein, we describe our PepSAVI-MS pipeline to discover and characterize peptides with antimicrobial activity through implementation of a hybrid bioassay-guided/peptidomics platform. We directly identify botanical peptides contributing to bioactivity profiles using robust microbial bioassays optimized for peptide screening and using a mass spectrometry-based peptidomics approach coupled to statistical modeling and informatics to identify and further characterize these peptides at the molecular level. These potential lead compounds are then tested against an extensive panel of clinical ESKAPE pathogens, as well as for favorable drug characteristics and determination of mechanism-of-action. Our platform enables robust mining of plants and other natural sources for peptidyl species with unique or broad-spectrum anti-infective properties and has the potential to lead to the discovery of novel chemistries at the forefront of modern drug discovery.