Dear Castor team,

Clinical software is one of the few domains where the stakes are unambiguous. Data integrity in a clinical trial isn't an engineering ideal, it's a regulatory requirement, and a patient safety one. That combination of purpose, impact, and required level of scrutiny is what drew me to healthcare software, and it's what makes Castor's mission compelling to me.

My engineering career has been shaped by regulated environments. At Ctrl Group and Fora Health, I built the backend platform still running clinical trials across the NHS today — achieving HIPAA compliance from scratch, integrating with Epic EMR, and later building AI decision support with formal safety evaluation frameworks for clinical use. Working within those constraints for years changed how I think about software: audit readiness isn't overhead, it's architecture.

As CTO at Wealthbit, I led the engineering function through the full lifecycle of a regulated FinTech product — from architecture and hiring to compliance frameworks and delivery. Building trust in regulated software is a particular kind of challenge; the bar for quality isn't set by what customers notice, but by what auditors and regulators require. I learned to hold both of those simultaneously.

The AI piece of this role is one I find genuinely exciting. I've been embedding AI into regulated healthcare settings with RAG systems, evaluation frameworks, and safety pipelines; at a time when most teams are still deciding whether to try it. More recently I've been doing some ML engineering freelancing directly: fine-tuning production models, building evals, and thinking carefully about what responsible adoption looks like when the stakes are real. Setting that standard across an engineering organization is work I'm ready to do.

I'm based on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, well within the CET overlap window. I'd love to talk about whether my background is the right fit for where Castor is heading.

Warmest regards,

Simon van Dyk