Dev Ittycheria

Dev Ittycheria led MongoDB as president and CEO from 2014 to 2025, a period in which he transformed a promising but still-maturing open-source NoSQL database company into one of the most widely used data platforms for modern application development. Under his leadership, MongoDB moved from a self-hosted developer tool into a full-fledged cloud database business built around Atlas, its managed database-as-a-service offering.

Ittycheria took MongoDB public on the Nasdaq in 2017, and steadily grew its customer base among startups and large enterprises alike, positioning the document-oriented database as a flexible alternative to traditional relational systems for developers building at internet scale. Atlas in particular became a significant growth engine, and MongoDB expanded into vector search and AI-application data infrastructure as generative AI adoption accelerated developer demand for flexible, AI-ready data platforms.

In 2025, MongoDB underwent a CEO transition when Ittycheria stepped back and Chirantan 'CJ' Desai took over as president and CEO, with Ittycheria remaining closely involved as an active board member. That arrangement proved short-lived: in September 2026 Desai stepped down to pursue a senior role at Meta Platforms, and MongoDB's board turned back to Ittycheria, appointing him interim president and CEO while it searches for a permanent successor.

Ittycheria's return underscores both his continued standing inside MongoDB and the company's determination to maintain continuity in its data platform strategy at a moment when enterprises are re-architecting applications around AI. His earlier decade running the company established MongoDB as a mainstream choice for building data-intensive and, increasingly, AI-native applications, a legacy the board is now leaning on again during the leadership transition.

Beyond MongoDB, Ittycheria previously served as CEO of BladeLogic, an IT automation company he took public and later sold to BMC Software, giving him a long track record of building and scaling enterprise infrastructure software businesses before returning to steer MongoDB through its current transition.