Tom Grissom

Summary

I have been doing infrastructure work for 20 years. I started at a hospital bringing up servers, SAN storage, and Cisco networking, and migrating applications from physical hardware to VMware. At the University of Illinois I oversaw the central VMware service, fixed its performance and uptime problems, and moved around 50 departments and 250 applications onto it. At AWS I was a Solutions Architect and trusted advisor for enterprise customers. For the last two years I have been working with CMS on scalable FHIR infrastructure and emerging AI tech, including agentic systems on AWS Bedrock.

Experience

Archesys, Inc. | Remote

June 2025 - Present — Solutions Architect

Named key personnel on a nine-figure CMS CCSQ contract (SIO program) supporting the QTAS quality measures environment.

• Led the QTAS Wave 1 cloud migration. We were the first ADO on the program to finish (November 2025): 6 ECS services and 14 CI/CD pipelines moved, with compute costs cut roughly in half by moving to Graviton. Archesys turned it into a customer case study.
• Designed the scaling approach for the HAPI FHIR platform behind clinical quality measures: a custom batch2 channel module that runs on either SQS or RabbitMQ, Aurora PostgreSQL read replicas, and CQL evaluation broken out into its own Fargate service.
• Built an agentic engineering assistant on AWS Bedrock and Bedrock AgentCore using LangGraph, with MCP servers for Confluence, Jira, GitHub, and LaunchDarkly and Cedar policies gating which actions need human approval.
• Stood up ephemeral FHIR connectathon servers (Terraform, SMART on FHIR, Synthea data), onboarded outside participants at public testing events, and keep the security control mapping and ATO documentation current across several projects.

Amazon Web Services | Remote

May 2022 - January 2025 — Solutions Architect

• Served as the trusted advisor for enterprise accounts: ran discovery workshops with customer engineers, architects, and management, then mapped what they needed to reference architectures they could build.
• Helped a healthcare customer move 1 PB of medical images to S3 with intelligent tiering, saving them about $5k a month and removing the storage ceiling they were hitting.
• Designed multi-region hybrid architectures covering compute, storage, and network, with guidance on high availability, disaster recovery, and capacity planning.
• Partnered with account managers and partner teams on their accounts, and led customer workshops covering a range of cloud-native solutions.

University of Illinois | Urbana, IL

November 2021 - May 2022 — Manager, Cloud Enablement

April 2014 - January 2022 — Lead Virtualization Systems Administrator

Held both roles at the same time from November 2021 through January 2022.

• Led the multi-cloud team managing 400+ accounts across AWS, Azure, and GCP; automation frameworks the team built cut deployment time by 70%.
• Took over the central IT VMware service when it had performance and uptime problems, fixed them, then earned the trust of around 50 IT departments to move onto it. Personally migrated over 250 applications from other VMware, Hyper-V, and physical servers with zero unplanned downtime.
• Deployed Nimble, Dell EqualLogic, and EMC VNX storage and architected the vSphere environment on Cisco UCS and Pure Storage: 400+ VMs across three data centers with integrated backup and disaster recovery.
• Right-sized resources from performance data, improving utilization by 40%.

Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center | Mattoon, IL

November 2006 - April 2014 — Senior Infrastructure Support Specialist

• Brought up new datacenter hardware from the box to production: Cisco UCS, IBM blade server chassis, and EMC SAN and NAS arrays, including racking, cabling, fabric zoning, firmware, and burn-in.
• Migrated over 75 applications from physical hardware to VMware, which meant researching each application, coordinating with the people who depended on it, and planning for what could go wrong.
• Managed the virtualization hosts, SAN storage, Cisco networking, and disaster recovery for a hospital running 24x7 clinical systems, and was the escalation point for hardware and deployment issues.

Technical Skills

• Datacenter hardware: Hands-on bring-up and deployment of Cisco UCS, IBM blade servers, EMC SAN/NAS and VNX, Nimble, Dell EqualLogic, and Pure Storage; VMware vSphere, vRealize, SRM, NSX; Veeam backup and DR
• Networking: TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, VLAN segmentation, Cisco switching and routing; Fibre Channel and iSCSI SAN fabrics with zoning, multipathing, and jumbo frames; 10/25/40GbE converged networking and FCoE on UCS fabric interconnects; NSX overlays
• AI platforms: AWS Bedrock and Bedrock AgentCore, LangGraph, MCP servers, Cedar policies, LLM inference; home lab running local models on NVIDIA RTX hardware
• Cloud and automation: AWS (multi-region, Graviton, ECS, Fargate, Aurora), Azure, GCP; Terraform, AWS CDK, Ansible; Python, Rust, PowerShell, Bash; CI/CD and DevSecOps
• Healthcare and compliance: FHIR and HAPI FHIR JPA, SMART on FHIR, CQL, CMS interoperability, ATO and security control mapping; Public Trust clearance
• Customer-facing: Trusted advisor to enterprise accounts, discovery and solution workshops, working alongside sales and partner teams, architecture review boards, mentoring

Certifications

AWS Certifications

VMware Certifications

Education

Indiana State University | Terre Haute, IN

Bachelor of Applied Science, Information Technology

Lake Land College | Mattoon, IL

Associate of Applied Science, Network Administration