Paul Gillespie

Observer
DISC Type : ic

Distinguished Engineer at Skyscanner

Dunfermline, Scotland, United Kingdom

Overview

Paul Gillespie is a Distinguished Engineer at Skyscanner, leading the Production Platform group that supports over 100 million monthly travelers. With over 20 years of experience and a BSc from Heriot-Watt University, he is a recognized expert on building and scaling web-scale infrastructure.

He is a scheduled speaker at AWS re: Invent, presenting on how Skyscanners architecture scales to support 200 million users.

Personality Overview

Curious

Value Driven

Assertive

They are generally good communicators and can be hard to convince.  They can sound friendly and charming but can quickly change gears to become inquisitive and probing. They are likely to ask many questions and look heavily for supporting information.

Topics They Care About

Cloud Architecture
He leads the team managing Skyscanner's large-scale AWS infrastructure and speaks at major tech conferences on architecting for hypergrowth on the cloud.
Distributed Systems
His work involves managing thousands of pods across multiple AWS regions, and he has a stated interest in distributed computing and microservices.
Process Automation
He has a publicly stated career-long interest in automation, motivated by a desire to eliminate error-prone, manual processes in engineering.

Media Appearances

The Perfect DevOps Storm – Talk by Paul Gillespie (Skyscanner). Featured in Alan Michael Reid – Conference Archive

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Change Is the Only Constant – Skyscanner Presentation. Featured in InfoQ

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SkyScanner: Building Highly-Available, Multi-Region Kubernetes Clusters on 100% Amazon EC2 Spot. Featured in YouTube

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Work History

3-2023
Distinguished Engineer at Skyscanner
7-2017
Senior Principal Engineer at Skyscanner
1-2014 - 7-2017
Senior Software Architect at Skyscanner
6-2013 - 1-2014
Staff Engineer at LivingSocial
10-2011 - 6-2013
Senior Platform Architect at Oberon Media

Education

1993 - 1997
Bachelor of Science (BSc) from Heriot-Watt University

More Information

Social Presence :

Prographics :

Exp : 28 Location : Dunfermline, Scotland, United Kingdom Job Level : Mid-senior Designation : Distinguished Engineer at Skyscanner
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Insights For Selling To Paul

During A Call Or A Meeting

DO's

  • Help them understand the risk aspect fully while inspiring confidence
  • Build rapport, it will come handy to handle hard questions later
  • Use phrases like ‘clear proof that’, ‘data shows’ etc.

DONT's

  • Don’t try to rush them into a decision, provide all necessary information first
  • Don’t rely excessively on your relationship with them to win the deal
  • Avoid making offhand commitments

When Cold Calling

When Writing An Email

While Negotiating & Closing

    The secret to closing fast with Paul is

  • Proven value, strong testimonials are important to them, relationships will have some weightage.
  • Will you ever get a clear answer from Paul

  • They are practical and friendly, don't expect a clear-cut response often.

Insights For Deal Planning

    How fast (or slow) will Paul move?

  • They like to perform full analysis and can take time to make any decision.
  • Can Paul take some risk or not?

  • They evaluate their decisions systematically and are less likely to take risks.

You And Paul

Personality Compatibility


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