Mike Ryan — CTO

In 2019, I joined Revolution Mortgage as its only developer — no team, no established tech stack, just a single office with a big vision. Today, I lead the technology organization behind one of the fastest-growing mortgage companies in the country, with over 100 branches nationwide. I built everything from the ground up: the infrastructure, the integrations, the engineering team, and the culture that holds it all together. What started as writing every line of code myself evolved into architecting systems and leading people — and I learned that scaling technology and scaling an organization are the same discipline applied at different layers. Now I'm focused on what I believe is the most consequential shift our industry has seen: AI that actually works in regulated lending. Not chatbots bolted onto legacy systems. Not LLMs making credit decisions they have no business making. I'm talking about purpose-built reasoning architectures that separate knowledge extraction from deterministic rule processing — AI that's auditable, explainable, and built for the regulatory reality of mortgage. I established Revolution's first AI Governance Committee because getting this right isn't optional; it's the cost of entry. But here's what I think most technology leaders get wrong: they optimize their systems and ignore their own operating system. I take a different approach. I apply the same engineering rigor to human performance that I bring to software architecture — structured protocols for nutrition, cognition, and physical output, all tracked and iterated like any other system. I write about this intersection in my newsletter, The Performance Stack, because I believe the highest-leverage upgrade a leader can make isn't a new framework or platform. It's themselves. If you're building in mortgage tech, rethinking how AI fits into regulated industries, or just believe that peak performance is a stack — not a slogan — I'd love to connect.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Fintech expert with a strong focus on AI and regulatory compliance.

Location: Columbus, Ohio, United States

Experience: 18 yrs 8 mos