Chris Williams
Building companies where AI can be trusted with what matters most.
Most recently CISO at Smarter Technologies
Fort Worth & Austin, Texas
About ›
I've spent my career doing two things.
First, modernizing the largest technology estates in the world. The F-35 program at Lockheed. Sysco's full legacy cutover. Walmart's move off mainframe to cloud. Then AWS brought me in to build their professional services practice from nothing.
Second, building companies from zero. Founding engineer at Thoughtful AI, where I stood up the entire technology organization through acquisition. CISO at SmarterDx and Smarter Technologies, owning security, IT, and compliance as one risk surface.
Enterprise scale taught me how big systems break. Zero to one taught me how to build them right.
Enterprise scale
Deloitte nine years of technology consulting, strategy through implementation
Lockheed Martin F-35 program
Sysco full legacy cutover
Walmart mainframe to cloud
AWS built the professional services practice from scratch
Zero to one
Founding Engineer, Thoughtful AI entire technology org, through acquisition
CISO, SmarterDx and Smarter Technologies security, IT, and compliance as one risk surface
Experience ›
Chief Information Security Officer Smarter Technologies
Jun 2025 – Present
Sole executive accountable for security and enterprise risk across the Smarter Technologies portfolio and primary advisor to the board on cybersecurity, compliance, and resilience. Set security, IT, GRC, and compliance strategy across SmarterDx and the portfolio, ran SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA audit programs end to end, led technology and security integration across M&A, and set security strategy for AI-native healthcare workloads handling PHI at enterprise scale.
Founding Engineer Thoughtful AI
Mar 2020 – Jun 2025
Took AI agents from idea to production before agents were a category, bringing open source, Python, and cloud together into a platform that automated enterprise revenue-cycle work and paid for itself in ROI our customers could measure. Built and led the team that shipped it. Underneath ran the security spine: identity, infrastructure, data handling, and agent operations designed as one system, with SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA grown in from the first readiness cycle rather than bolted on. Five years from zero through acquisition.
Senior Cloud Architect › Senior Innovation Architect › DevOps & Innovation Practice Manager
Jan 2019 – Aug 2021
Landed inside AWS Professional Services working with the Fortune 500 companies moving their most critical SAP workloads to the cloud, and left running the DevOps and Innovation practice for the global SAP business. Along the way I built the reference patterns for CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and serverless data pipelines that delivery teams used in the field, and set the capability standards new consultants trained against.
Senior Manager Magic Leap
Dec 2016 – Dec 2018
Brought in to accelerate SAP S/4HANA adoption on AWS for one of consumer technology's most ambitious hardware launches, on a timeline that did not move. Migrated the entire enterprise landscape from on-prem to AWS in three months, got it operational with DevOps, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code, and built the fully serverless data pipeline, warehouse, and real-time analytics layer the business ran on. Security role design and compliance readiness shipped with it, and the launch landed.
Manager Deloitte
Lockheed Martin › Sysco › Walmart
Feb 2008 – Dec 2016
Nine years of Fortune 100 transformations. Aerospace and defense programs at Lockheed Martin. Global ERP and supply chain at Sysco. Then Walmart, the world's largest retailer, moving decades of mainframe systems onto modern platforms without breaking the operations that keep stores running. Along the way I owned technical strategy for global ERP programs spanning finance, supply chain, manufacturing, and analytics, and mentored the teams that delivered. That progression ran straight into Magic Leap, where I left consulting to build the systems myself.
Business Information & Technology Intern Devon Energy
May 2007 – Aug 2007
Brought in to pioneer SCADA infrastructure operations and improvement across field operations and corporate networks. The internship scope said support. Treated it like ownership: went deep on the CygNet operational data platform, and when I saw a reliability gap in the data center, built a water detection method to close it. A summer that confirmed what I wanted to do with my career: find the gap, close it, leave systems better than I found them.
Education ›
Texas A&M University BS, Industrial Distribution · College Station, Texas
Certifications ›
Amazon Web Services Solutions Architect – Professional · Solutions Architect – Associate · SysOps Administrator – Associate · Developer – Associate · Big Data – Specialty · Cloud Practitioner
HashiCorp Terraform Associate