Technology
SVP of Engineering | Senior Technology Executive
Westford, MA · jpiekos@gmail.com ·
linkedin.com/in/johnpiekos
25+ years leading global engineering organizations through inflection points of change and growth — AI-powered product transformations, scaling teams from startups to Fortune 500, and driving 30%+ productivity gains through agentic development practices. Recognized thought leader in behavioral data infrastructure, real-time computing, and engineering culture transformation.
Experience
Senior Vice President of Engineering, Snowplow Analytics
Feb 2023 – PresentLead a global engineering organization of 60+ spanning software development, SRE, IT Services, Security/Compliance, and Customer Support. Snowplow is the leader in customer data infrastructure for AI, processing trillions of behavioral events per quarter for 240+ enterprise customers across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
- Launched Snowplow Signals — a new product delivering real-time behavioral context to AI agents and personalization engines, enabling B2B SaaS and marketplace customers to build agentic intervention systems with a "Bring Your Own Model" architecture; served as executive sponsor through the full product lifecycle from concept to GA.
- Delivered multiple new product lines including Event Forwarding, Real-Time Identity (cross-device identity resolution at pipeline speed), and a fully self-hosted / private managed cloud offering for enterprise security requirements.
- Led the company-wide cultural transformation to agentic software development practices — deploying AI coding tools across all engineering teams and establishing Claude Code-based development processes, achieving 30%+ productivity improvements.
- Ran SnowStorm, Snowplow's engineering hackathon program, achieving a 5× increase in project submissions, most of which fed directly into the product roadmap.
- Achieved SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 compliance across all cloud infrastructure while scaling engineering capacity and launching new product lines.
Senior Director, Engineering: CDP One SaaS & Control Plane SRE, Cloudera, Inc.
Jun 2021 – Dec 2022Led 100+ engineers across the global CDP One SaaS development, SaaS Ops automation, and Global SRE organizations operating three PaaS control planes across U.S., EU, and APAC regions.
- Grew CDP One SaaS business by 80% in 2022 with a 30-engineer global team.
- Managed 300+ nodes in single-tenant customer deployments supporting millions of analytic workload jobs per month.
- Spearheaded automation pipelines enabling customer SaaS deployments to be upgraded every 90 days via orchestration.
Vice President of Engineering & Global Customer Support, Cazena, Inc.
Feb 2018 – Jun 2021Acquired by Cloudera, June 2021. Led 30+ SWEs, SREs, and Customer Success teams delivering fully managed SaaS Data Lakes and Machine Learning applications in AWS and Azure across 7 global regions.
- Delivered 1M+ big data jobs per month with a 99.95% system availability SLA; achieved 75% revenue growth in 3 years while maintaining level headcount.
- Optimized cloud infrastructure spend, achieving a 30%+ reduction in monthly cloud costs.
Vice President of Engineering & Chief Security Officer, VoltDB, Inc.
Oct 2011 – Feb 2018Scaled engineering from 5 to 40+ individuals across software development, security, QA, customer support, and documentation. Served as Chief Product Owner for product strategy, roadmap, and IP.
- Grew revenue backlog to $30M+ within 5 years.
- Filed and received 4 awarded patents; served as InfoWorld columnist on real-time computing.
Earlier roles
Director, Database Engineering, Progress Software (2009–2011) · Sr. Director & VP, Web Engineering, EasyAsk, Inc. / Progress Software (2000–2009) · Director, Mercator Software · Director/Chief Architect, Novera Software · Staff Engineer, Sybase · Principal Engineer, Digital Equipment Corporation
See the old resume page for the full detail on these earlier roles.
Education & certifications
M.S., Computer Science, Worcester Polytechnic Institute · B.S., Computer Science (Cum Laude), University of Massachusetts Lowell
AWS Certified Big Data – Specialty · AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate · Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) · Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) · Certified Product Manager
Also
Harvard University Extension School — Teaching Fellow & Course Developer, Java for Distributed Programming (1999–2009) · Former InfoWorld columnist on real-time computing · MassChallenge Mentor (2017–present) · Multiple patent holder in search, navigation, and database technologies
Writing at Agile Making Progress.