Curriculum Vitae Paul de Weerd (48) |
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Summary
Technology leader with six years of management experience leading technical teams of up to 16 professionals and more than 20 years of hands-on operational expertise. Led initiatives to scale critical internet infrastructure services, reduced operational complexity and was responsible for a cross-departmental migration involving our big data platform. I love working with technology but even more so with people.
Employment history
2025 - today: Manager Internet Measurements - RIPE NCC, Amsterdam
At the start of 2025, I led the formation of the Internet Measurements team at the RIPE NCC, merging talents from three existing teams into a unified 18-person organization responsible for monitoring and visualizing internet infrastructure through our services RIS, RIPE Atlas and RIPEstat.
Since starting on this team, we have established operational frameworks including regular project roadmap alignment meetings to better align our work with the needs of our stakeholders.
2019 - 2025: Manager GII - RIPE NCC, Amsterdam
In 2019 I transitioned into formal leadership of the Global Information Infrastructure (GII) team after successfully serving as interim manager, taking full responsibility for service delivery, team performance, and strategic direction of the nine-person technical team. Led the team through a period of significant growth and modernization, establishing clear service level objectives.
Key achievements:
- Infrastructure Scaling: Directed expansion of DNS serving capacity, growing K-root from 68 to 121 hosted nodes globally, expanded AuthDNS core locations from 3 to 4, and launched the AuthDNS hosted nodes program reaching 23 distributed nodes
- Strategic Reorganization: Led architecture redesign separating our two big data projects (RIPE Atlas and RIS/RIPEstat) into dedicated clusters, improving sustainability and performance
- Data Collection Expansion: Oversaw RIS growth by adding two route collectors and expanding BGP peers from 792 to 1,499, significantly enhancing internet monitoring coverage
- Organizational Optimization: Successfully transferred RIPE Atlas infrastructure operations to specialized teams, improving operational efficiency
- Service Reliability: Maintained exceptional service levels while managing systems serving over 100 trillion DNS responses during tenure
2013 - 2020: UNIX engineer - RIPE NCC, Amsterdam
I started my career at the RIPE NCC in the Global Information Infrastructure (GII) team as a senior systems engineer. Our main responsibilities were the K-root DNS service, authoritative DNS services, RIS and the back-end infrastructure for RIPE Atlas and RIPEstat.
My work was focused on the operational well-being of our Hadoop clusters that process and store Atlas and RIS data:
- Building a brand new Hadoop cluster in a netbooting environment
- Writing ansible roles to configure the environment
- Helping with the initial data migration from our old cluster
- Planning and executing software upgrades
- Planning and rolling out capacity expansions, growing our cluster from .5 to 3 petabytes
- Design, build and implement a disaster recovery solution for our biggest data sets
- Working with our developers to find and fix problems in our software
2009 - 2013: UNIX engineer - IMC Trading B.V., Amsterdam
I was a member of the Trading Solutions team. This team is responsible for the infrastructure used by our traders on the different exchanges (Euronext, London Stock Exchange, Deutsche Börse, etc), including the UNIX and Windows machines, network connections and hardware and auxiliary equipment. My work was focused on the UNIX machines running our own proprietary and third party trading software.
I was responsible for the following deliverables:
- Built an environment for power management and monitoring of our server farm, allowing a reduction in rack space utilization at three sites
- Organized a workshop unix scripting for colleagues
- Mentored a junior colleague that joined the team
- Designed and implemented a logging infrastructure to store data for the global IMC network
- Migrated approximately one hundred machines to a new datacenter
- Improved timekeeping precision 3 orders of magnitude (sub-ms range to sub-µs range)
- Built an environment for network traffic analysis, analyzing several TB per day
2006 - 2008: Site Reliability Engineer - Google GmbH, Zurich, Switzerland
I worked for Google at the European engineering headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland. I was part of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), whose responsibility it is to keep the various Google properties available to our users; our team's focus was on Google Maps. We were responsible for:
- Upgrading production software to launch new features (e.g. launched street view)
- Updating live indexes to newer versions (e.g. launched http://maps.google.nl/)
- Capacity planning and management (load testing, acquiring extra resources, moving services to new data centers, etc. to handle a 300% increase in load over 2 years)
- Monitoring our services 24/7 and responding within tight SLAs (on-call)
- Interviewing more than one hundred candidates for the team
2004 - 2006: UNIX and Network engineer - BIT BV, Ede
2003 - 2004: UNIX engineer - Versatel, Amsterdam
1998 - 2003: Systems engineer - X-tern Automatiseringsdiensten / ICT Automatisering, Almere
Ancillary activities
2006 - today: Netwerkvereniging ColoClue
I joined ColoClue's networking committee in 2006 and worked on the following projects since:
- Design IPv6 numbering plan for our own /32 allocation and migrate to it
- Migrate members from 2 /24's of PI space to a /21 PA space
- Regular network and UNIX maintenance and hardware upgrades for the association's infrastructure
In February 2010, I joined the board as treasurer, later transitioning to president in early 2014. As treasurer, I managed annual budgets of approximately € 80.000 and spearheaded the transition from fixed-price to usage-based billing to promote sustainability and cost fairness among our members.
As president since 2014, I have led the association through significant growth, overseeing membership expansion from 104 to 241 active members. Key leadership achievements include modernizing our financial accounting systems through professional outsourcing (implemented in collaboration with our treasurer to improve efficiency and reduce volunteer workload), and managing complex stakeholder relationships with sponsors and suppliers through strategic vendor negotiations. My responsibilities span strategic planning, chairing monthly board meetings and annual general assemblies, budget oversight, and ensuring financial stability while fostering a collaborative community environment focused on providing learning opportunities in internet infrastructure and network operations.
2015 - today: Stichting EuroBSDCon
In 2015 I was asked to join the board of the EuroBSDCon foundation as president, leading a 10-member international board that organizes the annual European BSD conference across different cities throughout Europe. The foundation manages budgets of € 100.000 - 150.000 annually and coordinates with local organizing teams to deliver conferences for 150-300 attendees each year.
As president, I chair monthly board meetings and facilitate strategic discussions, including guiding collaborative site selection processes that balance geographic distribution across Eastern and Western Europe. I've served as a stabilizing force during significant board transitions, successfully recruiting three new board members through my professional network to ensure continuity. My leadership approach focuses on navigating interpersonal dynamics within our diverse, geographically distributed board and supporting local organizing teams with varying levels of conference experience. During 2021 COVID-19 restrictions, I helped guide the board's successful pivot to an online format for that year's conference, facilitating group decision-making to maintain community engagement during challenging circumstances.
Courses
- INSEAD Developing Emerging Leaders
- Puppet Fundamentals
- Introduction to Financial Markets
- Configuring Juniper Networks Routers (CJNR-M)
- HP-UX System and Network Administration I and II
- UNIX Fundamentals
Hobbies
I like to read, both fiction and technical or scientific books and articles. I'm also active in the OpenBSD community helping other users on discussion forums and mailing lists, hosting and editing a community website and occasionally doing some development work.
References
References available on request.
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