Enterprise open-source veteran brings nearly two decades of Red Hat leadership to scale Astronomer’s go-to-market as Airflow becomes the foundation for AI-driven data engineering
Astronomer, the company behind Astro, the leading unified orchestration platform powered by Apache Airflow®, today announced that Matt Simontacchi has joined as President of Field Operations. Simontacchi comes from Red Hat, where he spent nearly 19 years in expanding field leadership roles as the company scaled from an emerging business commercializing open-source to an industry-defining enterprise technology provider with nearly $7 billion in annual revenue. He will report to Pete DeJoy, CEO and Co-Founder.
“Matt knows what it takes to build a high-performing GTM engine around popular open-source technology,” said Pete DeJoy, CEO and Co-Founder, Astronomer. “He is also a hands-on leader who has a passion for rolling up his sleeves and building. As AI reshapes the enterprise data fabric, we’re lucky to have his leadership in evolving Astronomer to ensure we’re doing everything we can to service our customers in this important moment.”
Simontacchi joined Red Hat during a formative period in the company’s growth, helping to forge its culture and shape the go-to-market strategy that would propel it to become a global leader in enterprise open source. Starting as an Account Executive in 2006, he quickly distinguished himself as a natural leader, builder, and operator. This led him to take on progressively broader leadership roles as the business scaled, ultimately serving as Senior Vice President and General Manager of North America during his final four years, during which he oversaw nearly $3 billion in annual revenue. Throughout his tenure, Simontacchi was at the forefront of translating emerging open-source innovation into enterprise adoption, playing a pivotal role in building the field organization and customer engagement models that helped technologies like Linux and Kubernetes evolve from developer-driven projects into foundational elements of global infrastructure.
“What I learned at Red Hat is that when an open-source community earns the trust of the world’s best engineering teams, something powerful happens,” said Matt Simontacchi, President of Field Operations, Astronomer. “I saw it with Linux, JBoss, and Kubernetes, and the playbook for bringing that value to the enterprise is changing fast. AI is rewriting how companies build, deploy, and operate software. The opportunity at Astronomer is to take what I know about scaling enterprise field organizations and adapt it for a world where reliable, governed data pipelines are the bridge to the enterprise context that makes agentic AI work at scale. Airflow already has that trust, and now our task is to help organizations turn it into their competitive advantage.”
Simontacchi joins on the heels of Astronomer’s two most successful quarters in company history. The company continues to see accelerating enterprise demand as organizations adopt orchestration as the foundation for getting AI out of prototype and into production, and recently recorded:
- 55% year-over-year growth
- 120%+ NRR
- 122% ARR growth in EMEA
Apache Airflow® has continued its expansion across the enterprise alongside the rise of large language models and agentic workflows:
- 3,700+ contributors, more than any other Apache Software Foundation project, including Apache Kafka® and Apache Spark®
- 80,000+ global organizations currently use Airflow, up from 25,000+ in 2020
- 89% of Airflow users expect to use Airflow for more revenue-generating or external solutions this year, per the State of Apache Airflow 2026 Report, the largest data engineering survey ever conducted
Further Resources:
- Try Astro now for free and see why it’s the best way to run Airflow
- Download the 2026 State of Apache Airflow Report
- Register for our upcoming Upgrading to Airflow 3 webinar this Thursday, April 16
- Interested in joining Astronomer? We’re hiring
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