Paul McLaughlin

Systems Engineer II

Effectively managed non-email distribution channels, primarily SMS, within the Qualtrics platform, including integrations with WhatsApp and MS Teams. Led strategic projects for feature rollouts and deprecations, automated the provisioning of isolated customer SMS accounts to ensure regulatory compliance, and established customer VPNs for SMS traffic. Managed infrastructure migrations across data centres and automated routine host vulnerability patching using shell scripts and Rundeck. As an operations Subject Matter Expert (SME), consistently improved processes, reduced operational noise, and efficiently troubleshot and resolved customer and internal bugs.

Key Achievements

• Successfully migrated 800 customer accounts from a shared Twilio SMS setup to individual subaccounts, ensuring compliance and enhancing security.
• By analysing traffic patterns, cataloguing country-specific requirements, and implementing cost-effective solutions for non-responsive customers, completed the project with minimal customer disruption and isolated spammy behaviour to improve overall deliverability.

• Implemented an Operational Readiness Checklist to standardise legacy and newer services, significantly reducing technical debt and improving onboarding efficiency.
• Categorised requirements and created a structured plan for retrofitting standards, ensuring consistent CI/CD practices, logging, metrics, and alerting across all services.
• This initiative and a company-wide Operations Code Yellow enabled migrating all but two deprecated services to new standards, streamlining troubleshooting and reducing false positive alerts by 40%. Additionally, the standardisation enhanced operational efficiency and on-call responsiveness.

Systems Engineer I

Accountable for developing bespoke custom solutions to meet customers’ needs. Developed custom integrations with 3rd party providers and customers’ internal systems. Deployed in standalone AWS accounts, enabling customers to manage long-term maintenance and support within their own development teams. Gained significant experience with AWS and Terraform through customer AWS account provisioning. Managed troubleshooting and resolution of customer and internally reported bugs.

Key Achievements

• Automated the patching process for virtual machines hosting shared database clusters, significantly reducing manual maintenance efforts.
• Streamlined the process and ensured security compliance, by developing a Rundeck script that safely stopped and patched hosts based on their role (writer or non-writer) and partnered to create a smarter scheduler for running these scripts.
• Resulted in saving approximately one day per week for on-call engineers, allowing them to focus on proactive improvements and customer issues
• Additionally, the general automated scheduler saved a further two days per week by reducing context switching and manual intervention, enhancing overall operational efficiency.

• Implemented an Operational Readiness Checklist to standardise legacy and newer services, significantly reducing technical debt and improving onboarding efficiency.
• Categorised requirements and created a structured plan for retrofitting standards, ensuring consistent CI/CD practices, logging, metrics, and alerting across all services.
• This initiative and a company-wide Operations Code Yellow enabled migrating all but two deprecated services to new standards, streamlining troubleshooting and reducing false positive alerts by 40%. Additionally, the standardisation enhanced operational efficiency and on-call responsiveness.

Junior Systems Engineer

Contributed to a DevOps/SRE team specialising in observability, metrics, logging, and alerting. Accountable for provisioning hosts in AWS and Colo environments for all engineering teams, managing developer tooling such as GitLab, Jenkins, and Rundeck, and overseeing shared database infrastructure and replication strategy (MySQL). Additionally, managed local corporate network and IT issues and assisted in building out the colo data centre in Frankfurt.

Key Achievements

• Reduced annual expenditure by 95% on a 3rd party cloud provider by developing and deploying an in-house UI testing system using ChromeDriver with Selenium, named “Selenium Canary.” This system replicated the geographical dispersal of the provider’s edge nodes across Qualtrics’ five data centres, covering critical UI elements such as login and element presence checks.
• Enabled broader and more frequent testing, increasing unique feature tests from 15 to 100 within the first year.
• Saved approximately $250k in operational expenses, with an estimated value delivery close to $1M due to enhanced test coverage and early issue detection.

Implementation Consultant

A project management and customer training role, working with new customers onboarding to Qualtrics SaaS solutions. Projects ranged from basic product training to complex, multi-quarter rollout efforts involving multiple custom integrations. Collaborated closely with development and IT teams on the customer side for custom integrations.

Key Achievements

• Established a self-service IT station in the Dublin office, providing replacements for standard peripherals and cables, reducing IT troubleshooting tickets by 50% within the next quarter.
• Enabled staff to quickly replace faulty equipment, significantly cutting down wait times and unplanned IT work.
• Increased focus time for project management tasks and improved productivity for employees.
• Led to adoption and roll out of a similar system at HQ, aligning with Qualtrics’ philosophy of encouraging self-service and basic troubleshooting.

Product Analyst

Joined as the first employee outside of the global HQ, providing customer support and training. Managed local IT and networking for the Dublin office, including provisioning and inventory management for all new hire onboarding and new office buildout.

Key Achievements

• Promoted to team lead of the EMEA customer support team serving as an escalation point of contact and handling critical issues, working with our engineering team for incident management and customer liaison/notification. The team grew from three to 12 employees.

Maynooth University

National University of Ireland, Maynooth