Sebastiaan de Jong

Chief Revenue Officer Optimizely

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Sebastiaan de Jong is Chief Revenue Officer of Optimizely, the digital experience platform whose products span content management, commerce and the experimentation technology the company is named for. His tenure is unusual in that he has effectively grown up with the company through two changes of corporate identity: he joined in 2018 to build a European business that barely existed, ran it through Episerver’s acquisition of Optimizely and the combined group’s subsequent adoption of the Optimizely name, and expanded his remit across EMEA and then Asia-Pacific before being lifted onto the global executive team as Chief Sales Officer in February 2023. He is now the company’s most senior revenue executive. The distinctive thing about the record is continuity of business rather than a sequence of external hires — the same regional franchise, repeatedly enlarged, under three different corporate banners.

Career Highlights

• Listed today on Optimizely’s own leadership page as Chief Revenue Officer, the company’s most senior revenue role.
• Named Chief Sales Officer in February 2023, in a leadership refresh Optimizely announced alongside the appointment of Shafqat Islam as Chief Marketing Officer and framed as a response to a pivotal moment in digital marketing.
• Joined in 2018 with a specific brief to grow the EMEA region, and built the team that carried it.
• Promoted to Senior Vice President and General Manager for EMEA, and subsequently given South East Asia and ANZ as well — a remit spanning two hemispheres reporting into one general manager.
• Retained and expanded his mandate through the Episerver acquisition of Optimizely, completed on 21 October 2020, and through the combined company’s later trading as Optimizely.
• Specialised, by the company’s own description of him at the time of his 2023 promotion, in scaling, growth strategy and experimentation — the last being the product discipline at the core of Optimizely’s original business.

Professional Journey

The pre-Optimizely portion of de Jong’s career is poorly documented in company-published or press sources. Aggregator dossiers report a long tenure — around twelve years — at Exact, the Dutch business software company, rising from a sales role to a managing-director-level position with responsibility for cloud products across several European markets. That account is plausible and consistent with his later profile, but no primary source confirms it and it is therefore reported here rather than asserted.

He joined Optimizely in 2018. At that point Optimizely was the experimentation and progressive-delivery company, and the job was regional construction: grow EMEA, which meant building a team and a pipeline in markets where the product had little presence. In October 2020 Episerver, the content management and digital experience vendor, completed its acquisition of Optimizely; the acquiring company’s announcement at the time was explicit that the Optimizely experimentation platform would continue as a standalone solution within the group. The combined business subsequently traded under the Optimizely name. Through that sequence de Jong kept building — Optimizely’s own 2023 description of the period credits him with putting a strong team in place and delivering consistent growth, after which he took on South East Asia and ANZ in addition to EMEA, as Senior Vice President and General Manager.

In February 2023 Optimizely moved him onto the global executive team as Chief Sales Officer. The company announced it together with a new Chief Marketing Officer, positioning the pair as a leadership set for a market it described as being at a pivotal moment. He is now listed by Optimizely as Chief Revenue Officer; no announcement of that change of title was found, so the date of the transition from CSO to CRO is not established here.

Education

No education details were found in any source this project can use. Optimizely’s leadership page carries no biography, and no press release or independent publication states his degrees. Institution names do circulate through LinkedIn-derived aggregators, but LinkedIn is excluded as a data source for these profiles, so nothing is recorded.