Pete DeJoy

CEO and Co-Founder Astronomer

Last Reviewed: September 24, 2026

Executive Summary

Pete DeJoy is CEO and co-founder of Astronomer, the New York company that sells Astro, a managed platform built on the open-source Apache Airflow orchestration project. He helped start the company in 2017 and spent the following years on the product side, serving as chief product officer by 2025. In July 2025 he was named interim CEO after his predecessor resigned, and by early 2026 the company was naming him CEO and Co-Founder without qualification as he brought in a new CFO and a new head of field operations. What stands out is the route to the job. A co-founder who led product is taking the company into a new phase, with its pitch now centred on orchestrating data for AI in production.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Astronomer in 2017, according to CNBC and Fortune.
• Served as Astronomer’s chief product officer before becoming CEO, per CNBC’s July 2025 report.
• Became interim CEO in July 2025 when the board began a search for a new chief executive.
• Named “CEO and Co-Founder” in Astronomer’s February and April 2026 press releases.
• Appointed Chris Lynch, formerly CFO of Sprinklr, as Chief Financial Officer in February 2026.
• Appointed Matt Simontacchi, who spent nearly 19 years at Red Hat, as President of Field Operations in April 2026.

Professional Journey

DeJoy is a Bowdoin College graduate. He helped found Astronomer in 2017 around Apache Airflow, the open-source framework that data teams use to schedule and sequence their pipelines. The company became Airflow’s main commercial steward. It says it has driven every Airflow release since 2018 and employs a large share of the project’s top committers. Its commercial product, Astro, runs Airflow as a managed service for enterprises. Astronomer moved its headquarters from Cincinnati to New York City in early 2024, and Fortune reports it reached a valuation of $1 billion or more in 2022.

His work at the company was on the product side. By 2025 he was chief product officer, while Andy Byron was CEO. Byron was CEO when the company raised a $93 million Series D in May 2025, led by Bain Capital Ventures alongside Salesforce Ventures, Insight, Meritech and Venrock.

In July 2025 Byron resigned and the board made DeJoy interim CEO while it searched for a permanent chief executive. In his first public statement he said he was committed to “taking care of our people and delivering for our customers.” The company has not published a release announcing the end of that search. By February 2026, though, Astronomer was describing him as “CEO and Co-Founder”, and he was building out the executive team. He hired Chris Lynch as CFO, a finance executive who had overseen Sprinklr’s 2021 IPO, and said AI was driving “a step-function increase in demand” for the company’s products. In April 2026 he hired Matt Simontacchi from Red Hat as President of Field Operations. Given that Red Hat is the standard example of turning open source into an enterprise business, that hire says a good deal about how he sees Astronomer.

The company now reports more than 900 enterprise customers. Its current positioning treats orchestration as the layer that feeds data to AI agents in production.

Education

Bowdoin College

Graduate, per Fortune; the degree and field of study were not established from a source read for this profile.