About Me

Jonathan Dean

Over twenty years I’ve built engineering organisations everywhere from a university spinout developing cloud-connected medical devices to an enterprise platform serving millions of messaging interactions a day.

I was most recently VP of Engineering at Mobile Commons, where I launched and led a multi-year platform transformation to consolidate two decades of product history, spanning five mobile messaging products and the messaging API they deliver through, onto a single Elixir, Snowflake, and AWS foundation. I joined Upland Software in 2021 as Director of Software Engineering, expanding my remit across three product lines before being appointed VP when Mobile Commons was divested as a standalone business in June 2025.

I led a fully remote engineering organisation, distributed across four countries and structured into autonomous crews using the unFix model, a structure that gives teams real ownership and accountability without the overhead of traditional hierarchies, which I wrote about when I adopted it and again eight months in.

I chose the existing messaging API as the base for the new platform, carrying its Elixir stack across as the primary backend language. I also rolled out an AI-first development workflow across the full engineering organisation, achieving 80% AI-generated code on a system integration project and a 75% reduction in time spent on unit test creation.

Before that, I spent seven years at Eyoto as CIO, CTO, and then interim CEO, where I built a medtech engineering team from scratch and took a cloud-connected medical device from concept to production. Earlier in my career I held IT leadership roles in the public and private sectors.

My focus is always the same: engineering organisations that deliver real business outcomes, not just good software.

Read about my experience, my thoughts on engineering leadership, and technical notes on things I have built.

Education Link to heading

BSc (Hons) Computer Science, University of Exeter, 2001–2004

Professional Memberships Link to heading

BCS – The Chartered Institute for IT

Skills Link to heading

  • Engineering Leadership, Organisational Design & Team Building
  • Distributed Team Leadership
  • Platform Architecture & Transformation
  • AI-First Development Workflows
  • Continuous Delivery & DevOps
  • Cloud Platforms (AWS, Azure, OCI)
  • Regulated Software, Governance & Audit
  • Product Strategy, Planning & Delivery
  • Stakeholder & Investor Management