Dodecaplex Jack Challis Dodecaplex
Regulated AI  /  Healthcare · Life sciences · Financial services

I build governed AI tools for leading customers.

Fifteen years shipping production AI in regulated, data-sensitive industries — healthcare, life sciences, and financial services. I take agents and ML systems from prototype to audit-ready, with the evals, guardrails, and SOC2/HIPAA evidence that let Legal, Security, and Compliance all say yes.

Jack Challis
Jack Challis Burlingame, CA
01

What I do

Regulated industries don't need more demos. They need AI that ships — agents and pipelines that are measured, bounded, and audit-ready, built end to end from architecture through production.

01

AI agents in production

Agentic systems with tool-routing, hybrid retrieval (RAG), and guarded text-to-SQL — deployed where work already happens: Microsoft Teams, Copilot Studio, and zero-trust corporate networks, with managed-identity auth throughout.

AGENTS
02

Evaluation, safety & guardrails

AI output gets measured and bounded, not trusted blindly. Deterministic eval harnesses, type-safe agent loops, and objective gates that run before any human approval — a thick boundary around a creative interior.

EVALS
03

Data pipelines & analytics

Fragmented operational data unified into a single source of truth — LLM classification against domain rules, probability-weighted forecasting, idempotent re-runs, and strict separation of sensitive identifiers from shared reporting.

PIPELINES
04

Compliance & governance

SOC 2 Type II run end to end — gap analysis, control-policy authoring, evidence, audit readiness — plus HIPAA-aware architecture, PHI-safe data lanes, and security boundaries reviewed with zero high/critical findings.

SOC2 / HIPAA
05

AI Readiness & Risk Assessment

A clear-eyed read on where your organization actually is — the controls in place, the gaps that block deployment, and a sequenced path to a governed pilot.

ASSESSMENT
02

Selected work

Recent engagements building AI agents, evaluation systems, and data pipelines for regulated, data-sensitive organizations.

Client and proprietary product names omitted · technologies and architecture described in full · most delivered solo or in small teams, end to end.

AI agents in production
01 Federal research program

Clinical site-discovery agent

A natural-language agent for clinical-trial site feasibility over hundreds of thousands of documents — tool-routing across hybrid (vector + keyword) search, a guarded read-only text-to-SQL pipeline, and peer-adjusted feasibility scoring. OCR fallback lifts effective corpus coverage to ~99.9%; a JWT/JWKS-hardened bot ingress passed security review with zero high/critical findings.

Azure AI Foundry AI Search Vision OCR SQL · SELECT-only Teams Bot Terraform
02 Global information-services firm

Enterprise knowledge agents

Two production agents deployed inside a zero-trust corporate network — a project-discovery agent mining tens of thousands of engineering work items, and a product-knowledge agent over hundreds of mixed-format documents — surfaced through a Copilot Studio chatbot, with managed-identity auth throughout and a search-quality evaluation harness.

Azure Functions Azure OpenAI AI Search Copilot Studio Managed Identity Bicep
03 Healthcare AI company

Clinical evidence platform

A multi-service platform letting clinicians query real-world data and literature with LLM synthesis — React/TypeScript front ends, a SMART-on-FHIR OAuth flow into EHR systems, a graph-based Python search service, and an MCP tool-server exposing platform capabilities to third-party LLM clients with PHI-safe handling.

React / TS FastAPI LangGraph SMART-on-FHIR PostgreSQL Terraform / AWS
04 Biotech

Evidence-discovery proof of concept

An end-to-end conversational screening prototype over public trial registries and biomedical literature — tiered cross-source matching, semantic retrieval with a three-state eligibility model (match / no match / not specified), composite-score ranking, and a conversational UI with a live audit diagram and full provenance.

FastAPI Gemini embeddings NumPy SQLite / pgvector Cloud Run
Evaluation & safety
Deterministic eval harness

Runs an AI coding agent in isolated git worktrees and gates output against objective checks — correctness, latency budgets, extraction F1, schema and migration safety — before any human approval.

Type-safe agent loops

Static typing and boundary validation that catch AI-generated errors at the edge, with a strict split between the production runtime and the offline eval.

Auth / SDK spike

A gated build-vs-adopt evaluation of a vendor SDK against a battery of auth and channel tests that shaped a downstream production decision.

Data & analytics
Revenue-forecasting pipeline

A weekly pipeline unifying fragmented operational systems into one source of truth — LLM classification against domain rules, probability-weighted expected value, and prioritized, owner-assigned action queues.

Financial modeling & automation

Cash-flow reconciliation across accounts with trend-based runway forecasting, plus a set of operational automation and cost-ledger tools with strict data-separation rules.

Compliance
SOC 2 Type II program

Ran a SOC 2 Type II engagement end to end — gap analysis against the trust-services criteria, authoring and rationalizing the control-policy set, organizing audit evidence, and driving audit readiness with a quantified risk-budget model and adversarial review cycles.

03

How I work

01

Security from the start

Least-privilege access and explicit trust boundaries are designed in, not bolted on.

02

AI made evaluable

Deterministic gates and honest measurement — output is judged, never trusted blindly.

03

Sensitive data, separated

Protected identifiers stay isolated from anything shared or reported on.

04

Shipped, with a clean handoff

Tests, infrastructure-as-code, and documentation come with the delivery.

04

Writing & thinking

Latest essay
More or Less.

A physicist's framework for changing your life — feel the local slope, take one small step downhill, and repeat. Why the modest algorithm usually beats the wholesale transformation, and the rare moment it doesn't.

Read essay →
Essay · 8 min
Vibe DevOps: the boring parts that make it work

The unglamorous habits — real evals, tests, contracts at the seams — that keep AI-assisted building from collapsing into throwaway spaghetti. Eight rules I actually use.

Essay · 5 min
Cheap or expensive is the wrong question

DeepSeek at $0.14 a million tokens and $160 for an hour of a frontier model are two points on the same curve — not an argument about whether AI is cheap.

Essay · 6 min
The one AI metric that matters: H₅₀

The longest task an agent completes reliably — and why the curve is steeper than your roadmap assumes.

Essay · 6 min
What I wish I knew before a Physics PhD

The economics, the opportunity cost, and the unstructured time that paid off more than the degree.

Read all five essays → More on LinkedIn ↗
05

Experience

2025 — now
Independent AI/ML Consultant
Dodecaplex LLC

Governed Teams agents on Azure; evals, guardrails, and SOC2 evidence packs; Fabric/FHIR pipelines.

2024 — 2025
Sr. Director, AI/ML Operations
Fortrea · Global CRO

Established MLOps and AI governance across a 19,000-person clinical research organization.

2018 — 2024
SVP / VP, US Operations
Lucence · Genomics diagnostics

Built the US lab from the ground up and scaled US IT.

2015 — 2018
Director, Analytics & Outcomes
Global medical-technology company

Real-time inference from 200+ cancer centers; CI/CD and model deployment in an FDA-regulated environment.

2011 — 2015
Co-Founder & President
CliniCast · acquired 2015

Cloud platform and discharge-forecasting models from inception — 85% accuracy in clinical use.

Education
Yale University
PhD, Physics
University of Kentucky
BS, Physics & Mathematics
Certifications
  • Azure Data Scientist Associate (DP-100)
  • Azure AI Engineer (AI-900)
  • Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900)
  • AWS Solutions Architect — Professional
06

Get in touch

Dodecaplex LLC

Governance you can actually ship.

The best first step is a short scoping call. Bring a workflow you'd like to make governed and audit-ready, and we'll talk through what's involved.

Book a 20-min call →
Dodecaplex © 2026 Jack Challis · Dodecaplex LLC
San Francisco Bay Area