Platform Engineering · Healthcare IT Leadership
I lead IT for a healthcare diagnostics company, and I still ship the code myself.
I'm Chester Davison, Director of Information Operations at Babson Diagnostics, where I lead the IT team and push for rapid engineering velocity without compromising compliance — HIPAA, CLIA, and SOC 2 all factor into how we ship. Before that, I spent over a decade as a platform engineer with a background in Chemical Engineering and a Master's in Computer Science, helping 10–12 startups get off the ground, including several in healthcare.
Chester Davison
Director, Information Operations at Babson Diagnostics. Platform engineer building compliant systems that still move fast.
What I bring
- Regulated-environment delivery (HIPAA, CLIA, SOC 2)
- Clear, stable platform contracts
- Hands-on coding with strong technical leadership
- Opinionated DX with room for teams to innovate
01 / Focus
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
02 / Experience
Experience snapshot
I lead IT for a healthcare diagnostics company and have spent over a decade as the glue between infrastructure and product teams. My focus is shipping quickly without cutting corners on compliance — HIPAA, CLIA, SOC 2, and the broader controls that come with handling PII and diagnostic data.
Director, Information Operations
Babson Diagnostics · Healthcare diagnostics
Current
- • Leads the IT team, setting technical direction for internal systems, security posture, and vendor relationships.
- • Balances rapid delivery for the business with the compliance requirements of a regulated healthcare environment (HIPAA, CLIA, SOC 2).
- • Brings a hands-on, platform-engineering mindset to IT leadership — stays close to the systems, not just the roadmap.
- • Partners with lab operations, quality, and security teams to keep infrastructure changes safe and auditable.
Senior / Staff Platform Engineer
Multiple startups and growth-stage companies
Prior
- • 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.
03 / Selected work
Platforms I've built
Alongside my work in healthcare IT, I've spent years building and shipping platforms end-to-end — proof that the leadership work stays grounded in real, hands-on engineering.
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.
04 / Where I'm most useful
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.
05 / Contact
Let's talk
Whether you have the next big idea or need help untangling an existing platform, I'm open to select consulting engagements.