Platform Engineering · Staff / Principal IC
I build platforms that let product teams move at their best pace.
I'm Chester Davison, a platform engineer with a background in Chemical Engineering and a Masters in Computer Science, who enjoys sitting at the intersection of infrastructure, DX, and business outcomes. I've helped 10–12 startups get off the ground, including several in healthcare, and I design and build the tooling, APIs, and foundations that keep engineering orgs calm and fast, even as they scale.
Chester Davison
Platform engineer specializing in distributed systems, serverless architectures, and developer experience.
What I bring
I've led and built platforms that carry real revenue, handle production incidents gracefully, and give product engineers paved roads instead of permission tickets.
- • Clear, stable platform contracts
- • Pragmatic reliability over theoretical purity
- • Hands-on coding with strong technical leadership
- • Opinionated DX with room for teams to innovate
Core technical focus
I've spent my career designing and operating platforms where correctness, observability, and iteration speed all matter.
- Distributed systems & event‑driven architectures
- Serverless platforms (AWS Lambda, API Gateway, AppSync)
- CI/CD, observability, and production incident response
- API design (GraphQL & REST) and platform SDKs
- Multi‑tenant SaaS, billing, and permissions
Platforms & domains
My comfort zone is owning services end-to-end: from design docs and architecture diagrams to Terraform, code, and runbooks.
- AWS (Cognito, AppSync, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS, SNS)
- Kubernetes & container orchestration
- Next.js and modern frontend platforms
- Stripe and payments infrastructure
- Data pipelines, analytics events, and warehousing
Experience snapshot
I've served as the glue between infrastructure and product teams, often owning the platforms that everyone else builds on. That includes authentication, billing, internal APIs, and the tooling around them, with a strong focus on regulated environments (HIPAA, SOC 2, PII, and healthcare standards like HL7, FHIR, and EHR integrations).
Senior / Staff Platform Engineer
Multiple startups and growth-stage companies
2016 — Present
- • Designed and implemented multi-tenant, event-driven backends on AWS using Lambda, API Gateway/AppSync, and DynamoDB.
- • Led efforts to standardize logging, metrics, and tracing so incidents could be diagnosed in minutes instead of hours.
- • Built internal tools and SDKs that turned complex cross-team integrations into a few lines of code.
- • Partnered with product, security, and finance to evolve platform capabilities without breaking existing customers.
How I typically operate
- • Start from the use cases, then design the contracts.
- • Write design docs, but keep them short and actionable.
- • Ship in slices that teams can adopt incrementally.
- • Stay on-call for the systems I own and measure success.
Selected platforms I've built
A few of the systems where I've owned the platform layer end-to-end from architecture and implementation to operations.
Bitszer
Founder / Platform Engineer
Built a trading platform for digital assets with an emphasis on reliability, observability, and clean domain boundaries.
Designed the core services, APIs, and data flows so new features could ship quickly without compromising safety.
Stack: Event-driven services on AWS, typed contracts, and automated testing pipelines.
Adszer
Platform & Infrastructure Lead
Created the foundational platform for a performance marketing product so teams could experiment safely and at speed.
Standardized logging, metrics, and deployment workflows, cutting incident MTTR and making on-call predictable.
Stack: API gateways, streaming pipelines, and shared libraries for campaign/billing logic.
Tip the Play
Technical Founder
Built a platform for college athletes to receive tips from fans, from auth to payouts.
Owned the full stack: Cognito auth, AppSync GraphQL APIs, Stripe integration, and the Next.js web experience.
Stack: AWS Cognito, AppSync, Lambda, Stripe, and a modern React/Next.js front end.
Where I'm most useful
I'm at my best when there's a mix of strategy and hands-on building. If you need someone to both design the platform and be in the code, that's my lane.
- Taking a messy monolith and carving out clean, well‑owned platform domains.
- Designing APIs and contracts that are boring to use – in the best way.
- Making onboarding for new product teams go from weeks to days.
- Turning tribal knowledge into paved‑road tooling and docs.
Let's talk
If you're you have the next big idea or you need help untangling an existing platform, I'm open to select consulting engagements.