Jonah Kowall

I've spent my career watching infrastructure teams get squeezed: asked to govern more and move faster, with tools built for the old way of doing things. Solving that problem is why I joined Spacelift.I started in computer science, co-founded one of the first content filtering companies in the late 1990s and spent the next 15 years building and running infrastructure at startups and large enterprises. That’s when I first noticed the gap between how fast a business wants to move and how fast its infrastructure can support that. In 2011 I moved to Gartner, where writing research for CIOs gave me a view of infrastructure problems at scale across hundreds of organizations. It confirmed that what I'd experienced firsthand was a structural problem that still persists to this day.From there I moved to the vendor side: helping scale AppDynamics from 300 to 1,900 people and a $3.8B acquisition by Cisco, then leading product and engineering at Kentik, Logz.io and Aiven. In each role, I focused on giving teams better visibility and control over increasingly complex infrastructure.Throughout all of it, I've stayed active in the open source community as a maintainer and contributor. Open source is how you avoid being held hostage by your vendor, and I've seen what happens when teams don't treat it that way.I joined Spacelift because the problem of infrastructure velocity at scale is only getting harder in the age of AI. Teams today need real control planes with real guardrails, and that’s what we’re building.