He was the product guy. Now he answers the phone.
Pete DeJoy runs Astronomer, a New York company that most people had never heard of until a Coldplay concert briefly made them care. The product Astronomer sells is a commercial home for Apache Airflow, an open-source workflow orchestrator that is boring in the specific way that infrastructure has to be boring in order to be useful. Data teams write jobs. Airflow schedules them. Astronomer makes it not break. This is a real business - the company has raised about $378 million and employs around 500 people - and until July 2025 it was executed almost entirely offstage.
Then the CEO left. The details of why are documented elsewhere and belong to a different genre. What matters here is that on a Saturday in July, Astronomer's board named DeJoy, the 30-year-old co-founder and chief product officer, as interim CEO. He had been at the company for eight years. He had held the CPO title for five months. His first public statement described the spotlight as "unusual and surreal," which read less like corporate hedging and more like an accurate weather report.
I'm stepping into this role with a wholehearted commitment to taking care of our people and delivering for our customers.Pete DeJoy, first statement as interim CEO, July 2025
The DeJoy résumé is a small mystery in the way that a certain kind of American founder story tends to be. He grew up in Bronxville, a leafy Westchester suburb whose primary export is people who work in Manhattan. He went to Bowdoin, a small liberal arts college in Maine, and studied chemistry and physics. Nothing about that degree is obviously downstream of a career running the commercial layer around Apache Airflow. It is worth noting only because most SaaS CEOs' academic backgrounds are cover songs of one another, and his isn't.
He co-founded Astronomer in 2017. The company's origin story is straightforward: data teams were increasingly relying on Apache Airflow, an open-source project born inside Airbnb, and running Airflow in production is annoying. Astronomer commercialized that annoyance. Its managed platform is called Astro. Its observability product, which shipped under DeJoy's product tenure, is called Astro Observe. The naming is on brand.
The product to product-of-product arc
For most of the company's life, DeJoy's job was to figure out what to build. He was named vice president of product in January 2023. He was named chief product officer in February 2025. In the interim period, Astronomer became the corporate steward of a large chunk of the modern data stack - the layer nobody puts on their homepage but the layer that pages engineers at 3 a.m. Astro Observe and the Airflow 3 release, both of which DeJoy has discussed publicly on the Data Engineering Podcast, are the tangible outputs of that arc.
Airflow 3, in particular, is the sort of software release that founders like DeJoy are supposed to want to be famous for. It introduced data awareness, architectural improvements, and multi-language support - a genuine step in the maturation of an open-source project that a decade ago was mostly a set of Python DAGs held together with hope. DeJoy is the person who talked about it in interviews all spring. He is not the person the internet suddenly wanted to talk about in July.
Over the past few years, our business has experienced incredible growth. Astronomer is now a household name.DeJoy, "Moving Forward at Astronomer," LinkedIn Pulse, 2025
This is the sort of sentence that reads two ways depending on when you're reading it. Before July 2025, "household name" is aspirational corporate rhetoric. After July 2025, it is a description of what a Coldplay camera briefly accomplished, and reads slightly wry. Whether DeJoy meant it that way is between him and his post drafts.
How Astronomer actually works
The pitch, cleaned up: enterprises run their data pipelines on Apache Airflow. Airflow is free. Operating Airflow at scale, across multiple clouds, with governance and observability and role-based access, is not free. Astronomer sells the operating layer. Its customers are the sort of companies that discover, three years into their data platform investment, that the phrase "we run Airflow ourselves" is doing a lot of work.
The company sits at an interesting spot in the current market. It is not an AI company, exactly, though AI workflows show up as a use case in its marketing and its customers increasingly train models on top of pipelines Airflow orchestrates. It is not a data warehouse. It is not an ETL tool in the modern sense. It is the connective tissue - the thing that decides when the ETL tool runs. When a data platform breaks, it usually breaks at orchestration first, which is why the company has a business.
The interim in interim CEO
The word "interim" is doing work in DeJoy's title. Astronomer's board has not committed to him permanently. He has not, in his public statements, campaigned for the job. His posture reads like someone who genuinely wants to keep shipping product and is doing the CEO job because the company he co-founded needs a CEO and he is holding the closest chair to the desk. That is a legitimate reason to be an interim CEO. It is also, in tech-founder terms, a slightly rare one.
Whether he stays permanently is a question the board will answer on a different timeline. In the meantime, Astronomer is doing what it has always done, which is orchestrate other companies' data. This is duller than the story that put DeJoy in the CEO chair. This is also, based on everything he has said publicly, exactly what he wants his job to be about.