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.

I am now looking for my next technology leadership role, and have some capacity for fractional work in the meantime.

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