ieso Welcomes Mike Chynoweth as Head of Engineering

Meet Mike Chynoweth, ieso's new Head of Engineering!

Mike has spent more than 20 years building software in places where quality isn't optional: healthcare, security, highly regulated SaaS. He joins us from Solera Health, and before that led engineering at Nintex and AssureSign, where he spent over a decade growing from engineering manager to VP.

Ask anyone who's worked with him and you'll hear the same thing: Mike builds teams that get things done fast without cutting corners.

Besides being an incredible software engineer, Mike is also a fabulous human. He was born in South Africa, moved to the U.S. at 13, and now lives in Tennessee with his wife, their three kids, and three cats. He's a builder at heart, at work and at home.

We wanted to get inside Mike’s head, so we handed him the mic instead of a keyboard. Here's what he told us.

What drew you to ieso?

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Mental health is one of the most important and yet historically underserved areas in healthcare — the need is enormous, and access has never kept up. I've seen firsthand how deeply it affects people and their families, so this work isn't abstract for me. What drew me to ieso specifically is the chance to expand access at scale, with clinical oversight intact, and the opportunity for me to help shape both the platform and the organization as we do it.

You've built software in regulated, high-stakes environments for years. What changes when clinical outcomes and patient trust are on the line?

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The cost of getting it wrong changes everything. In most software, a bug costs a user a few minutes. Here, it can affect someone's care or the ability of the clinician to help them. So, the bar for what ships isn't negotiable — rigorous testing and safety gates aren't overhead, they're the baseline. And every change has to earn its place by actually improving care or how we deliver it.

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‍You have a reputation for building teams that ship quality at speed. What does that culture look like IRL?

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It starts with sequencing: you can't ship fast if you're not shipping with quality, because every quality miss you catch late costs more and erodes trust. Day to day, it looks like engineers who own the problem, not just the ticket — people who truly understand the user, become experts on what they're solving, and take responsibility for whether their work actually solved it. That ownership and accountability is what makes speed sustainable rather than heroic.

ieso has nearly a million hours of outcomes-indexed therapy data — the world’s largest dataset of its kind. What gets you fired up about building on it?

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‍No two patients are the same, but a dataset this size lets us find patients with similar profiles and see which interventions and skills worked for them, measured against established assessments like the PHQ-9 and GAD-7. So, what really excites me is the potential of turning that deep history into evidence-based insights we can put in front of patients and clinicians at the moment they need them. It's support and decision-making grounded in what's genuinely helped people before.

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You've been building things your whole life. What's something you're tinkering with outside of work right now?

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Right now, it's the yard. Over the last few years, my wife and I got a little carried away adding trees, plants, and flowers — and quietly created a weeding-and-maintenance nightmare for ourselves. So, this summer we've been reworking it into proper, well-defined garden beds: more beautiful to look at, and a lot less upkeep. It turns out that designing your way out of a mess you made is pretty satisfying, whether it's a codebase or a flowerbed!

We're so glad Mike is here. His knack for tackling tough problems, building exceptional teams, and creating products that matter is already making an impact at ieso. As he builds what's next in mental health technology, we can't wait to see where his vision and expertise take us next. Watch this space!

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Connect with Mike on LinkedIn and say hello! 👋