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Brett Yates
Open to CTO & technical leadership roles

CTO & VP Engineering.
0→1 product builder.

I build products from zero, then hire and lead the team that scales them. Most recently founding engineer through CTO of a HIPAA-regulated orthopedic recovery platform, from first commit to 70,000+ patients. Earlier, cofounder and CTO of a Techstars-backed payments platform moving $2.5M+ monthly.

Brett Yates
15+ yrs
owning architecture & delivery
70K+
patients on millions in funding
$10M+
payments processed at scale
$2.5M+
secure monthly funds transfer

In short

A hands-on technology executive & builder who architects mobile, web, and cloud systems personally and then hires and leads the team that carries them forward. I've run security and compliance for regulated healthcare and payments products through years of continuous shipping, without slowing the roadmap to do it. It's a combination that fits a team building from zero just as well as one working through a major transition.

Hiring Brett was the best business decision I ever made.
CEO, myHealthTrack
Jason Burns
Jason Burns
CEO at myHealthTrack
Managed Brett directly

I hired Brett early on in myHealthTrack and five years later I still think it's one of the best calls I made as a founder. He quickly made the call that our product wasn't ready to scale, rebuilt it from the ground up, brought infrastructure management in-house under his ownership, then eventually hired and led the team that grew everything from there.

What set Brett apart wasn't just his technical skills, it was also his judgment. We're in healthcare, so security and compliance are critical. Brett owned that from day one. He built a custom encrypted vault for patient health data, got us through a SOC 2 readiness assessment, and kept us HIPAA compliant for the 5+ years he was with us.

Brett handled the scaling of our platform and we never had a significant outage under his watch. He cut our infrastructure costs by 40% and stayed deeply hands-on the entire way, even as the team grew around him. He stayed on through our leadership transition this year because he genuinely cared about the outcome. Any company lucky enough to get Brett as a technical leader is getting someone who builds like a founder.

Mick Wroblewski
Mick Wroblewski
Founder, CEO of Babylon Technology Services
Worked with Brett on the same team

I've worked with Brett on basically every project I've done in my career. We've worked as peers. I've worked for him, and he's worked for me. I couldn't recommend him highly enough.

There is nothing Brett can't do at an elite level. Not only can he set technical direction, scale products, manage people, and lead teams, but he can also design, write code, build and administer servers, and get deep into the infrastructure himself. And he's done all of this across consumer apps and enterprise SaaS, even building complex systems in regulated industries.

Brett and I go back to the days when we had to manually install SSL certs and integrate payment processors pre-Stripe. His technical depth comes from having done things the hard way, but he also recognizes when there's a better way. I've watched him do exactly that with AI, adopting new tools as they've emerged and developing genuinely AI-native workflows.

Beyond all of that, Brett is a genuinely great person and a joy to work with. He communicates clearly with everyone from CEOs to junior developers and interns, and he treats people at every level with the same respect.

He's exactly the person I'd want leading technology and product at my company.

Steven Seidman
Steven Seidman
COO at myHealthTrack
Worked with Brett on the same team

I worked closely with Brett for years while myHealthTrack scaled, and what stuck with me wasn't just what he built, it was how well he ran things day to day. He set up our CI/CD pipeline from nothing, cut our deployment time way down, and kept a distributed team moving: code review standards, an agile rhythm, the kind of operational groundwork you only notice when it's not there.

He was the guy you wanted around when things got tight, whether that was a platform handling over a million API calls a month or the parts of the job that founders quietly dread: security, compliance, the AWS bill, the audit questions.

That same instinct showed up in newer stuff too, like our early AI work on triage and adaptive exercise programs. He always asked how it would hold up once real patients were using it and where the line needed to be drawn between AI and human involvement.

Brett's one of the rare people who can go deep on the technical side and also build and run the team around him. Working with him made my job easier for years, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

Kyle Montgomery
Kyle Montgomery
Software Developer at myHealthTrack
Reported to Brett directly

I worked with Brett for 4 years at myHealthTrack, while he served as our Chief Technology Officer. During that time, I learned a tremendous amount from him, particularly through his expertise in software architecture, product development, and building technology from the ground up. He excels at taking ideas from 0 to 1 and turning them into well executed products.

One of Brett's greatest strengths is his communication. He has a unique ability to bridge the gaps between the technical and non-technical. This allows him to plan development thoroughly and keep the needs of end users center to every decision.

Above all, Brett consistently delivers. His passion for technology is evident in the quality of his work and ability to execute. In looking for a technology leader who combines technical expertise with strong communication and dependability, I highly recommend Brett.

I was fortunate to work under Brett's leadership, and I'd be happy to speak further about my experience working with him.

Building with AI, in production

Three live apps on iOS and Google Play, 33,000+ combined downloads

Experience

May 2026 – Present
San Diego, CA

Founder / Fractional CTO

One4Yes

Independent technology studio building AI-native products and advising early-stage teams, from product strategy and architecture through development and deployment.

  • Shipped three live AI-native apps on iOS and Google Play with 33,000+ combined downloads: voice-enabled retrieval-augmented search, computer vision valuation, and procedurally generated puzzles with AI artwork (100,000+ games played). Continued advising myHealthTrack on AI strategy and coding workflows.
Aug 2020 – Apr 2026
San Diego, CA (Remote)

Chief Technology Officer

myHealthTrack

Software as a Medical Device orthopedic recovery platform, built with orthopedic surgeons as an alternative to in-person physical therapy. Joined as VP Engineering and sole engineer, promoted to CTO in 2021, fractional through the leadership transition.

  • Built the first versions of the full product suite myself: React Native patient and provider apps, provider portal, web application, internal CMS, and CI/CD pipeline. Scaled the platform from zero to 70,000+ patients.
  • Hired and led the engineering team (two full-stack, one mobile, one QA), fully remote. Set the agentic workflows, agile process, code review, and deployment practices the team worked under.
  • Shipped AI-assisted triage that assessed patient-reported severity so urgent cases reached a clinician faster; anything uncertain defaulted to human review. Led R&D on exercise programs that adapt to each patient's actual progress.
  • Owned security and compliance across a five-year regulated build: designed a custom encrypted PHI/PII data vault covering the full patient base, led the platform through a full HIPAA compliance audit, and completed a SOC 2 readiness assessment.
  • Owned the engineering side of the SaMD regulatory posture, scoping functionality, including the boundaries on AI triage, to stay within FDA enforcement discretion (confirmed via 513(g) request).
  • Architected and operated the entire AWS environment: serverless infrastructure serving 1M+ API requests a month at 99.9% uptime. Cut infrastructure costs 40% through a Lambda migration and database optimization.
2014 – 2021
Chicago, IL (Remote)

Fractional CTO

CharityWatch

  • Sole technology leadership for a national charity watchdog across a seven-year engagement, held concurrently with the roles below. Modernized legacy infrastructure and put automated deployment and monitoring in place where there had been none.
  • Built the secure online donation payment system, then hardened it against sustained real-world attack attempts to keep donor payment data protected.
Dec 2018 – Aug 2020
Chicago, IL (Remote)

Senior Technical Consultant

Red Foundry

  • Architected ecommerce platforms for manufacturing and travel clients processing $5M+ in annual transactions, and led the assessment and refactoring of legacy mobile apps.
Jun 2017 – Nov 2017
Chicago, IL

Senior Product Manager

Vail Systems

  • Took a new API product from concept to market in five months, leading a cross-functional team of 8. Built the back-end management interface and helped shape the go-to-market strategy.
Nov 2012 – Jun 2017
Chicago, IL

Senior Software Engineer

Babylon Technology Services

  • Led development of the ticketing platform for the PGA Tour's BMW Championship: $10M+ in sales, 40,000+ orders, 500,000+ scanned tickets. Built a real-time inventory system handling 50,000+ concurrent users at peak.
  • Built platforms across financial services, including PCI-compliant payment processing and Evolution Collect, a debt-collections platform. Led the migration from monolith to microservices.
May 2010 – Dec 2016
Boulder, CO

Cofounder & Chief Technology Officer

RentMonitor

  • Co-founded a SaaS rental-payments platform and scaled it to $2.5M+ in monthly ACH and card volume across 5,000+ properties. Techstars Boulder graduate.
  • Built the full product: tenant portal, landlord dashboard, and PCI-DSS compliant payments infrastructure.

Skills & competencies

Payments & transactional systems

  • PCI-compliant processing
  • ACH & card money movement
  • High-volume orders
  • Real-time inventory
  • Hardening under live attack

AI / applied ML

  • AI-assisted triage & classification
  • LLM agents & RAG pipelines
  • Machine learning
  • Fine-tuning
  • Computer vision
  • Generative content pipelines
  • Voice interfaces
  • AI-native architecture
  • Agentic development (Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, Hermes, Paperclip)

Architecture & cloud

  • AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, EC2, RDS, S3)
  • REST APIs · OAuth
  • Multi-tenant SaaS
  • Serverless & microservices
  • Docker · CI/CD
  • GitHub · Cloudflare
  • High availability at scale

Engineering

  • JavaScript / TypeScript
  • React · React Native · Vue
  • Embedded JS widgets & SDKs
  • PHP / Laravel
  • Python (working knowledge)
  • MySQL · PostgreSQL · Redis
  • Mobile delivery (iOS & Android)

Security & compliance

  • HIPAA
  • SOC 2 readiness
  • PCI-DSS
  • Encrypted PHI/PII handling
  • Software as a Medical Device (FDA enforcement discretion)
  • Penetration testing

Leadership

  • 0→1 product development
  • Scaling & team transitions
  • Team building & hiring
  • Fractional & interim leadership
  • Technical strategy & roadmap
  • Board & investor reporting
  • Embedded / white-label integrations

Texas Christian University · B.A., Management Information Systems · Techstars graduate