📋 Read-Ahead for Friday's Conversation

You already have my resume. This site gives you the stories behind it—so we can spend Friday talking about Corient's challenges, not rehashing my background.

Jack of All Trades
Infrastructure Leader
Who Gets Sh*t Done

Data scientist → DevOps → VP Global IT Ops in 4 years. Incident response commander. Built production platforms, led warrooms when things broke, passed government audits, and taught myself to code when engineers couldn't fix the problem.

🎖️ Army Sapper Leader: Trained to enable movement and survivability under pressure—
the same mindset I bring to platform reliability, incident response, and M&A integrations.

See My 30/60/90 Plan What Makes Me Different
4 Years
Scrum Master → VP Global IT Ops (Multi-Continent Teams)
3 Clouds
IaC Expert: AWS, GCP, Azure (Led AWS→Azure, AWS→GCP)
Warroom
Incident Response Commander (24/7—I Show Up)
Terabytes
Built AI Agents Finding Rare Diseases in Public Health Data

My Superpower: Dependability

💪
100% In My Control
Someone will always be a better coder. Almost everyone is a better writer. But I will always be the most dependable. That's job security.
🔥
Warroom Commander
Production down? I'm the warroom commander. Multiple systems failed? I lead the call, knock out issues one by one until we're back up. That's what I do.
🛠️
Takes the Unglamorous Work
No one wants G Suite admin? I'll do it. Need a security engineer? I'll teach myself. Company needs management in an area no one wants? I take it on.

Why I'm Built for This Role

🎖️
Army Sapper: Built for This
5 years as combat engineer officer (West Point → Army). Sappers enable movement (golden paths), survivability (SRE/reliability), and controlled demolitions (safe migrations). Trained to lead complex ops under stress—exactly what M&A and incident response demand.
✅
Governance & Compliance
Passed Australian government audits. Handled security patching, monitoring, alerting. Built dashboards for early-warning systems.
🚀
Data Scientist → VP in 4 Years
Started coding to help my team. Grew from Scrum Master to VP managing multi-continent engineering teams. Drove same jeep 15 years—not flashy, just effective.
☁️
Multi-Cloud IaC Expert
Owned Infrastructure as Code across AWS, GCP, Azure. Led AWS→Azure and AWS→GCP migrations. I know all three.
🤖
Built 3 Generations of AI Agents
Agentic-to-Agentic framework for rare disease detection. Ensemble models. Self-learning systems processing 7 years of American claims data. Optimized ML runs from manual to autonomous.
⚖️
Balance On My Terms
Flexible schedule? I'll work late, early, weekends when needed. But I ask for 3 hours daily to be a dad to my 7 and 5 year old. Balance left up to me—I thrive in that.

The Journey: Data Scientist → VP

Started as a Data Scientist
Big Data Analytics Specialist
Specialized in big data analytics—terabytes of healthcare data, machine learning, finding patterns in massive datasets.
Shifted to DevOps
Started as Scrum Master, Then Started Coding
Began as a scrum master (which I'll admit isn't real project management). Started coding in DevOps to help the team when engineers couldn't fix issues. Taught myself software engineering to solve production problems.
VP of Global IT Ops in 4 Years
Managing Multi-Continent Engineering Teams
Grew to VP managing engineers across multiple continents. Owned IaC across three major clouds. Became the "incident response commander"—the person called when production goes down to lead the warroom and fix it fast.
Hands-On CTO Building AI Agents
Atomo Inc - Healthcare AI
Built 3 generations of AI agents for rare disease detection:

Gen 1: Agentic-to-Agentic framework learning best ML params for highest F1 without overfitting.
Gen 2: Self-learning agent reading disease papers, formulating experiments and hypotheses. Ensemble with Gen 1 boosted results.
Gen 3: No manual features—used 7 years of American claims data to formulate its own score (Beta).

Handled governance, passed Australian government audits, managed NIH grants. Led through market changes when Big Pharma pulled spending and government grants dried up.

What I Learned (The Hard Way)

Hyperfocus Can Be a Mistake
I spent months perfecting AI agents because I saw them as the path to financial stability. But I ignored things that could have kept us afloat longer. Lesson: Balance innovation with pragmatic survival.
Financial Visibility Matters
The company's finances were kept at arm's length from me. I should have pushed harder for transparency and VC funding (founder was anti-VC as a bootstrapper). Lesson: Senior leaders need full financial context.
Agents Are Workflow Optimizers, Not Magic
Twitter thinks AI agents are autonomous little people. They're Python wrappers optimizing workflows—only as good as what we understand today. My May code is radically different from November code because of how fast core models evolve. It's "living code" now, more personalized than traditional engineering.

30 / 60 / 90 Day Plan

Days 0–30: Baseline & Risks
Understand the foundation
• Map critical services + data flows ("what breaks the firm")
• Identify top 10 reliability risks + security gaps + cost hotspots
• Define core SLOs and incident severity model
• Establish service catalog + owners + on-call expectations
Days 31–60: Ops Maturity
Build the operational muscle
• Observability baseline: logs, metrics, traces, dashboards
• Alert hygiene + runbooks + incident command structure
• Change management: CI/CD controls + IaC gating
• FinOps tagging + budget guardrails
Days 61–90: Scale Patterns + Team Building
Make growth predictable and enable AI adoption
Infrastructure Scaling:
• Golden-path infrastructure modules + environment vending
• Integration playbook: SaaS ↔ internal ↔ vendors
• M&A onboarding runbook (Day 1/30/90) + metrics

AI Enablement Program:
• Drive enterprise-wide AI tool adoption (Cursor, ChatGPT, automation tools) for every team
• Force multiplier effect: AI makes the org work faster and look bigger by spending less on headcount
• Design persona-based workshops and learning paths (curiosity → confident usage)
• Create "happy paths" and reusable templates for high-ROI AI workflows
• Build self-serve AI enablement hub (runbooks, FAQs, video walkthroughs)
• Define success metrics: adoption (WAU/MAU), depth of use, outcome impact (time saved, ticket deflection)

Team Scaling:
• Hiring plan: SRE nucleus + cloud platform leads using my network
• Culture > Talent - Build teams that align with Corient's values first
• Champions networks and internal case studies for AI fluency

Core Capabilities

Cloud Platforms
DevOps & IaC
SRE Practices
Observability
Incident Response
Data Engineering
Integration Architecture
Security-by-Default
FinOps
M&A Integration
Team Building
Executive Communication

Experience Highlights

COO/CTO, Atomo Inc
2025 – Present
Built and launched production platform (Axilpy/Axle) end-to-end. Led data engineering, cloud operations, and cross-functional growth initiatives. Scaled healthcare analytics capabilities while managing NIH government grant operations.
VP Global IT Operations, OneView Commerce
Feb 2023 – 2025
Led Infrastructure as Code (IaC) transition, oversaw multicloud operations, and drove operational improvements across 14 Provinces. Deep experience with cloud computing, automation, and virtualization technologies.
Director of Cloud Operations, OneView Commerce
Jun 2020 – Feb 2023
Led cloud transition from AWS to Azure using Terraform/Terragrunt. Managed growing teams across four continents. Expertise in complex infrastructure solutions and managing offshore teams.
Earlier Roles
2013 – 2020
Scrum Master/Operations Manager (OneView), Senior Analyst (Accenture), Program Manager II (Knoema), Data Scientist (Atomo Inc). Built foundation in data engineering, project management, operations, and technical leadership across multiple industries.

Let's Make Friday Productive

Now that you know the stories behind the resume, let's spend Friday talking about what matters: Corient's infrastructure challenges, your M&A integration roadmap, and how I'd approach the first 90 days.

What I'm ready to discuss:
• Your current infrastructure pain points
• Multi-cloud strategy and cost optimization
• Building vs buying for M&A integration tooling
• Team structure and hiring priorities
• How to balance innovation with operational stability

Meeting: Friday
Email: tanner.vanessen@gmail.com
(click to copy)
Phone: +1 (616) 540-1504
Reference: Full Resume LinkedIn Profile

Why I Want to Work for You

I don't just want any VP role. I want this one, working for you, at Corient.

After reviewing your LinkedIn and background, I see someone who understands that infrastructure isn't just about keeping the lights on—it's about enabling the business to move fast without breaking things. You've built teams, scaled platforms, and navigated the chaos of high-growth environments.

That's exactly the kind of leader I want to work for. Someone who gets it. Someone who knows that the best infrastructure is invisible until it needs to save the day. Someone who values dependability, pragmatism, and getting shit done over flashy titles and buzzwords.

I'm not looking to be a "yes man" or just execute orders. I want to be your trusted operator—the person you call when production is down, the person who makes M&A integrations boring, the person who builds the team and culture that scales with Corient's ambitions. I want to make your infrastructure challenges disappear so you can focus on the bigger picture.