Team Profiles: Paul Drennan

Get inspired by the talent and passion that drives Validation Cloud forward. Meet Paul Drennan, our skilled Senior DevOps Engineer based in Arkansas.

Q: What’s your role at Validation Cloud? Tell me about your background and experience prior to joining the team.

A: I joined Validation Cloud as a Senior DevOps Engineer on the Infrastructure team. My background is in infrastructure and operations for large web2 companies including Box, Walmart, eBay, and Microsoft. Before joining Validation Cloud, I worked for another institutional staking provider as a Site Reliability Engineer.

Q: What motivated you to join the Validation Cloud team, and in what ways do you envision your role supporting the company's mission?

A: I was excited to join Validation Cloud after meeting with the Engineering Leadership. They have a clear vision and have brought on a lot of great engineers to execute it. I am looking forward to helping contribute to their vision by building scalable and reliable infrastructure solutions.

Q: How did your interest in Web3 technology develop? How do you believe Validation Cloud can leverage Web3's impact to empower organizations?

A: I first became interested in web3 in 2017 when I started mining Ethereum in my basement. Since then I have been following the space as a hobby and in 2021 I decided to focus my career on it.  

Validation Cloud offers products that allow organizations to start building in web3 without having to build and manage their own infrastructure. This will allow organizations to move faster.

Q: Which team values resonate with you the most, and why?

A: Integrity is the team value that resonates most with me.  It is important that customers know Validation Cloud will always do the right thing.  This will allow large enterprises to feel confident in using our products and having us as a partner.

Q: What strategies will you implement to encourage effective collaboration with your team members in order to deliver high-performance and customizable products in staking, node operations, and data-as-a-service?

A: I will lead by example to help deliver the highest quality infrastructure for Validation Cloud’s products and services.  I will use my previous experience to ensure high availability, reliability, and scalability.  I will help to foster a team culture that encourages open communication and team work.

Q: What do you like to do outside of work? Any hobbies or interests outside of Web3?

A: Outside of work I enjoy gardening, cooking, watching movies, and playing video games.  For the past few seasons, I have been growing various peppers.