Paul Wiltgen was born in Luxembourg on March 20, 1982. He started on cello at six and switched to percussion two years later, training classically at the Conservatoire in Esch-sur-Alzette before international workshops turned his attention to jazz. In 1998, while still in high school, he formed a trio with the pianist Michel Reis and the bassist Marc Demuth, playing around Luxembourg for several years under their three names. In 2001 he moved to New York to study at the Manhattan School of Music, earning both undergraduate and graduate degrees in drums under John Riley, David Liebman, Samir Chatterjee and Michael Abene.

He stayed in New York for over a decade, working as a sideman while occasionally leading his own groups. From 2004 to 2007 he led a New York band called The Paislies, which released its debut on Fresh Sound New Talent in 2007 with the saxophonist Samir Zarif, guitarist Jesse Lewis, pianist Miro Sprague, keyboardist Eliot Cardinaux and bassist Perry Wortman. He was also an original member of The TransAtlantic Collective, a London and New York ensemble led by the bassist Michael Janisch and saxophonist Patrick Cornelius, appearing on its 2008 album Traveling Song (Woodville Records) alongside the pianist Kristjan Randalu and trumpeter Quentin Collins. Over these New York years he worked with musicians including Joshua Redman, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Linda Oh, Ambrose Akinmusire, Mike Moreno, Lage Lund, Will Vinson, Miles Okazaki, Dave Binney, Franz von Chossy, Tim Collins, Cedric Hanriot and Pablo Held, and recorded as a sideman on Riaz Khabirpour Group's The Seeker (2009, Konnex Records), Franz von Chossy's Pendulum (2009, Etcetera Now) and the Estonian singer Siiri Sisask's Lingua Mea (2011, Jazz'n'Arts).

The Reis, Demuth, Wiltgen trio reunited in 2011, and its self-titled debut, recorded at Studio Laborie in France and released on Laborie Records in 2013, drew wide critical notice. Places In Between followed in 2016 on Double Moon Records, recorded that August in Brooklyn, after which the trio signed to the Italian label CAM Jazz for Once In A Blue Moon (2018) and Sly, recorded in May 2019 at Stefano Amerio's studio in Cavalicco, Italy, and released in 2020 and 2021 on CD and vinyl respectively. The saxophonist Joshua Redman began sitting in with the trio in 2016 after his own quartet shared a double bill with them at a French festival, and in March 2018 the group toured Europe together, including a concert at the Philharmonie Luxembourg with the trio's music arranged for the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg by the multiple Grammy-winning composer and conductor Vince Mendoza. The trio recorded that orchestral repertoire with Redman and Mendoza in 2022, released in 2026 on CAM Jazz as Freedom Trail, drawing its programme entirely from the trio's existing catalogue rather than new material. In November 2022 the trio also premiered Synaesthesia, a walk-in, holographic multimedia collaboration with the filmmaker Emile V. Schlesser, commissioned by Esch22, the European Capital of Culture, for a sold-out ten-show run in Luxembourg.

Alongside the trio, Wiltgen co-leads Organic Trio with the New Orleans guitarist Brian Seeger and the French organist Jean-Yves Jung; the group's 2017 album Saturn's Spell (Jazz Family) reached number two on the JazzWeek jazz radio chart and spent two months in its top ten. He also plays drums and co-produced Acadia: Way Of The Cairns (2020, Whirlwind Recordings), a quartet album led by the saxophonist Patrick Cornelius with Kristjan Randalu on piano and Michael Janisch on bass, on which Wiltgen also composed one of the nine tracks. More recently he has drummed in Shauli Einav's Luxembourg-based quartet, appearing on Einav's 2023 album Living Organs (Outside In Music) alongside Laurent Coulondre on piano, organ and synthesizer and Eran Har Even on guitar and bass guitar. He teaches drums at the Luxembourg City Music Conservatoire and endorses Canopus Drums.

Wiltgen's playing spans several distinct settings without settling into one. The Reis, Demuth, Wiltgen trio works squarely within the acoustic piano-trio tradition; reviewing Sly for All About Jazz Italia, Alberto Bazzurro praised the group's technical and idiomatic command while noting that its thirteen originals, five of them Wiltgen's own compositions, extend rather than reinvent the form. That same grounding in the tradition, learned under the New York drum pedagogue John Riley, sits alongside a very different, groove-driven voice in Organic Trio's organ-guitar-drums format, and a third register entirely in Freedom Trail's reworking of the trio's book for full orchestra under Vince Mendoza's arrangements. Across all three, critics and collaborators, Joshua Redman among them, have singled out the trio's rapport as the strongest evidence of Wiltgen's compositional and rhythmic partnership with Michel Reis and Marc Demuth, a musical relationship that predates any of their recordings by fifteen years.