Grady Peterson
(952) 334-5523 | grady@gradyp.com | www.gradyp.com | Maple Grove, MN | LinkedIn
Infrastructure Engineering Leader
Enterprise Architecture | Digital Transformations | Cloud Strategy | Process Optimization
Professional Summary
Infrastructure leader with 20+ years of experience operating at the architecture and management level across healthcare, education, and enterprise environments. Known for identifying risk before it becomes failure, building teams that outlast the projects they deliver, and making complex migrations boring through careful preparation. Equally comfortable owning a strategy, mentoring an engineer, or getting hands-on when it matters. Seeking a leadership role where the work has a tangible human impact.
Key Achievements
- Risk Identification & Advocacy. Repeatedly identified critical infrastructure risks ahead of failure, from a publicly exposed datacenter vulnerability discovered on day one, to a single-point-of-failure backup platform that nearly took down an entire customer base, driving remediation before or immediately after impact.
- Infrastructure Modernization. Led multi-year HCI modernization programs across healthcare, EdTech, and enterprise environments, replacing legacy Cisco/VMware/SAN stacks with Nutanix, delivering migrations so well-planned they became non-events.
- Crisis Leadership. Directed recovery of a catastrophic datacenter water event, restoring nearly one petabyte of customer backup data with no loss of customer data, then immediately converting the incident into approval for a long-advocated platform replacement.
- Team Leadership & Mentorship. Led and developed infrastructure teams as acting manager, building cohesion, setting technical standards, and growing engineers, the most rewarding part of the work.
- M&A & Global Integration. Delivering post-acquisition infrastructure consolidation for a global reinsurance organization spanning 30,000+ users across five countries, owning US execution while influencing global architecture alignment.
- Security & Compliance. Reduced organizational risk across HIPAA and PCI environments through AD hardening, zero-trust foundations, and compliance delivery, including remediating a years-old critical vulnerability that left an entire healthcare network four digits from a catastrophic breach.
Career Experience
Senior Infrastructure Engineer | Howden RE | April 2025 – Present
Global reinsurance provider | Global Infrastructure Engineering
Scope: ~300 VMs (US acquired entity) | Azure (US) | 30,000+ user global org spanning US, UK, Singapore, Australia, Bahamas
- Leading US infrastructure stabilization and modernization following Howden Group acquisition of TigerRisk, owning technical execution across a legacy environment while aligning to global standards and preparing for full domain and platform consolidation.
- Planning and will execute migration of ~300 large-scale VMs across Minneapolis and Nashville datacenters to new 12-node Nutanix HCI clusters per site, integrated with Howden’s global Azure-connected network spanning 30,000+ users across London, Singapore, Australia, and the Bahamas.
- Driving AD cleanup and domain consolidation work in advance of full TigerRisk-to-Howden domain migration, minimizing lift and risk by methodically reducing technical debt before the cutover.
- Maintained full US operational independence for 3+ months when global network connectivity failed, ensuring zero disruption to analytics workloads supporting the acquired company’s insurance modeling platforms.
- Unblocked a stalled Python/Linux development project by developing working SMB connection demos, identifying and solving a fundamental Linux/AD integration gap the development team didn’t know existed.
- Self-directed acquisition of Terraform skills within weeks to support Azure DevOps pipeline work, fully documenting an undocumented deployment pipeline and preparing to lead infrastructure-side execution of a .NET 10 production upgrade.
- Supporting global Tanium endpoint deployment across ~2,500 endpoints in the acquired US infrastructure, coordinating manual patching and remediation to ensure successful integration with the group security program.
- Proactively identifying and escalating architectural risks in the migration program, including a 270TB file server consolidation issue with significant performance implications, ensuring critical decisions are captured before execution begins.
Infrastructure Architect | Western National | April 2023 – November 2024
Property & casualty insurance carrier | Infrastructure & Cloud Architecture
Scope: Architecture and direction across hybrid VMware/Nutanix on-prem and AWS (EKS/Fargate) | ~100 services in migration | SD-WAN/WAF
- Embedded with Enterprise Architecture team to provide infrastructure perspective on a major cloud replatforming initiative, from Docker Swarm on-prem to serverless Kubernetes on AWS EKS/Fargate.
- Advocated for a staged migration approach over a single cutover strategy, citing replatforming complexity and application rebuild requirements; diagnosed and supported repeated migration attempts when initial approach stalled.
- Served as senior technical escalation across infrastructure and DevOps teams, resolving blocking problems in Apple MDM integration, iSCSI multipath performance, and AD/certificate automation.
- Contributed to DigiCert certificate automation and AD security hardening initiatives in an advisory capacity.
- Standardized solution documentation artifacts and supported knowledge management across infrastructure and DevOps teams.
IT System Engineer Lead / Acting Infrastructure Manager | Infinite Campus | February 2020 – April 2023
National K–12 EdTech provider | Infrastructure Engineering & Operations Leadership
Scope: 4 datacenters (2 corporate, 2 colocated at Switch Las Vegas & Reno) | ~4,000 VMs | active/active
- Identified and drove a multi-year platform modernization strategy, replacing aging Cisco UCS/NetApp infrastructure across four datacenters with Nutanix HCI, deliberately sequencing the transition to eliminate lifecycle risk, reduce operational complexity, and preserve VMware exit optionality ahead of the Broadcom acquisition.
- Engineered stakeholder and vendor alignment prior to formal proposal, securing Nutanix pricing below anticipated refresh cost by strategically staging a proof-of-concept deployment that created competitive motivation without telegraphing intent.
- Authored and shepherded infrastructure modernization proposal through Architecture Board approval, translating complex technical tradeoffs into business outcomes for non-technical leadership.
- Identified and repeatedly advocated for replacement of a single-point-of-failure customer backup platform housed in the organization’s least reliable datacenter, maintaining a ready proposal through multiple budget cycles despite deprioritization.
- Led emergency response to a datacenter water event that took the platform offline, directing full team recovery efforts, physically salvaging, drying, and rebuilding the array, restoring nearly one petabyte of customer backup data with a loss of only 7 files over approximately one week.
- Leveraged the crisis to secure immediate approval for the previously proposed S3 replacement, implementing a regionally separated, highly available Nutanix Objects platform that modernized ~1PB of customer backups, eliminated the single point of failure, and aligned with existing cloud S3 initiatives.
- Led and developed an 8-person infrastructure team as Acting Manager for 9 months, maintaining delivery continuity on a complex multi-year program while managing priorities, roadmaps, and incident response.
Senior Technology Engineer | Twin Cities Orthopedics (Revo Health) | August 2016 – February 2020
Orthopedic healthcare provider | Systems & Virtualization Engineering
Scope: 2 datacenters (corporate office + Eden Prairie colo) | 1,100+ concurrent VDI users | HIPAA environment
- Identified a critical security vulnerability on day one, VNC exposed to the public internet with a four-digit numeric password, granting potential admin access to the entire network including patient data, clinical imaging, and corporate systems. Remediated immediately and reported to leadership before any exposure occurred.
- Proposed and delivered infrastructure modernization from aging Cisco/NetApp to Dell VXRail HCI, reducing platform complexity and cost while improving performance, the infrastructure remained in production operation years after deployment.
- Planned and executed a full datacenter migration to a dedicated colocation facility, leveraging VMware SRM to pre-validate and test all failover workflows before a single rack was moved, making the physical migration a controlled, low-risk cutover.
- Built and maintained a VMware Horizon VDI platform supporting 1,100 concurrent clinical and corporate users, including a full parallel rebuild and staged user migration to deliver a major platform upgrade with zero disruption.
- Diagnosed a persistent boot storm IO bottleneck on the VDI platform, proposed resolution, and withstood skepticism until an independent VMware engagement validated the diagnosis and praised the platform setup, proposal was ultimately not funded, but the root cause was definitively confirmed.
- Implemented a Dell-based backup platform aligned to HIPAA compliance requirements, including WORM storage, offline backup, and a full validation test plan, successfully passing regulatory audit.
Senior Engineer | ShopNBC (Evine Live) | March 2012 – August 2016
National televised retail network | Systems & Virtualization Engineering
Scope: 3 datacenters (corporate HQ + 2 distribution center DCs) | multiple VMware clusters (internal services + VDI) | PCI environment
- Designed and built greenfield datacenter infrastructure for a 260,000+ sq ft distribution center expansion, including full physical layout, power distribution via Eaton UPS, cooling load calculations, generator transfer runtime planning, and Cisco blade/Nutanix SAN deployment, coordinating directly with facility builders through multiple layout revisions.
- Executed a complete replacement of aging 4Gb Brocade fibre channel infrastructure across ~20 racks, migrating to 16Gb Cisco Nexus with fully structured cabling, eliminating chronic storage timeouts and retries, reducing rack temperatures, and removing literal bags of tangled legacy cable, all with zero downtime via careful multipath cutover sequencing.
- Led execution of a Red Forest-based Active Directory security redesign alongside an external security consultant, implementing a dedicated management forest with break-glass admin model across 3-4 domains, resulting in zero credential leakage during a subsequent penetration test, the first clean result in 11 years for the auditing firm.
- Developed a Linux-based boot environment (Ubuntu/bash) enabling ~150 remote workers to connect securely to Horizon VDI from any hardware, eliminating endpoint compatibility issues and giving support staff a known, controlled environment to troubleshoot.
- Mentored junior engineers through complex infrastructure projects, beginning a consistent career practice of developing technical talent alongside delivery work.
Technical Competencies
Platform-agnostic by design, the specific tool matters less than understanding the problem. Representative experience includes:
- Cloud & Virtualization: Azure/Entra, AWS (EKS, Fargate), VMware (ESXi, Horizon, NSX), Nutanix AHV
- Containers & Automation: Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, GitLab CI/CD, Azure DevOps
- Security & Compliance: IAM/MFA, least privilege, HIPAA, PCI, zero trust, Tanium, Red Forest/ESAE
- Networking & Edge: Cisco routing/switching/VPN, SD-WAN, Check Point firewall/WAF
- Storage & DR: Dell EMC, Nutanix Files/Objects (S3), SRM, DR planning, Fibre Channel
- OS: Windows Server, Linux (Debian/Ubuntu/CentOS/RHEL), macOS