Spacelift Adds Senior Leaders in Sales and Product as Growth Momentum Accelerates With Spacelift Intelligence

The hires land at a pivotal moment for the infrastructure automation market. Developer adoption of AI coding tools has passed an inflection point, with 90% of developers now using AI assistants, according to Google Cloud's 2025 DORA report. Platform and DevOps teams are under mounting pressure to keep up, and Spacelift is helping them meet this challenge by adopting AI within infrastructure operations and pairing it with existing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and GitOps pipelines. 

"Our customers are telling us that infrastructure can no longer move in weeks while developers move in minutes," said Paweł Hytry, co-founder and CEO of Spacelift. "John Henry and Jonah bring exactly the combination of enterprise scale and product depth we need at this stage of growth acceleration. John Henry has repeatedly built and led sales organizations through hypergrowth at companies like Pure Storage, Lacework and Own Backup. Jonah has spent his career turning category-defining technology into products customers love, from AppDynamics through Logz.io, Aiven and Paessler. Together they'll help us translate the momentum behind Spacelift Intelligence into durable enterprise growth."

Accelerating Momentum

The leadership additions follow a period of significant product and market momentum for Spacelift:

• Spacelift Intelligence launched in March, introducing a natural-language orchestration layer and an AI assistant that spans deployment, diagnostics, policy and drift management across a customer's entire infrastructure footprint.
• Spacelift Intent reached general availability, giving platform teams an AI-powered, natural-language deployment path for rapid prototyping and experimentation while preserving IaC as the system of record for production.
• Customer adoption continues to expand across industry leading companies, including Duolingo, Figma, Moody's, Checkout.com, 1Password and Redfin, all of whom rely on Spacelift to manage infrastructure for the AI-accelerated software era.

With Archer and Kowall on board, Spacelift is positioned to scale both its product vision and its enterprise reach as more organizations move from traditional IaC pipelines to AI-native infrastructure orchestration.

A Proven Enterprise Sales Leader to Scale Global Go-to-Market

Archer joins Spacelift from Salesforce, where he served as vice president of sales for Trusted Services following Salesforce's acquisition of Own Company. Prior to Own, where he led global partner sales, Archer held senior sales leadership roles at Lacework and spent nearly seven years at Pure Storage, ultimately serving as area vice president of sales. Across those roles, he has built and run go-to-market organizations that delivered category-leading growth in infrastructure, security and data protection.

At Spacelift, Archer is responsible for scaling the company's global sales organization, deepening its enterprise footprint and expanding its partner ecosystem as more organizations standardize on Spacelift to govern infrastructure at scale.

"Enterprises are operating across more clouds, more accounts and more infrastructure than ever, and they need to deploy it safely, quickly and with real governance," said Archer. "That is exactly the problem Spacelift is solving, and Spacelift Intelligence takes it a step further by moving from simple automation to an AI-native control plane. The infrastructure automation market is being recalibrated right now, and I believe Spacelift is positioned to be the next generation category leader. I'm excited to help bring that vision to more customers."

A Product Leader at the Intersection of Open Source, AI and Enterprise Software

Kowall joins Spacelift after leading global product and design at Paessler and brings a rare combination of hands-on infrastructure expertise and executive product leadership. A former Gartner analyst who led the influential APM Magic Quadrant and created the Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics category, Kowall went on to drive new products (AppDynamics for SAP) and product strategy at AppDynamics through its $3.8B acquisition by Cisco and then led product and engineering at Kentik, Logz.io and Aiven.

Kowall is also an active open source contributor, serving as a maintainer of Jaeger in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a member of the OpenSearch Technical Steering Committee and a regular contributor to OpenTelemetry. His background is directly relevant to Spacelift's roots: the platform is built to work with Terraform, OpenTofu, CloudFormation, Pulumi and Ansible, and supports customers operating across both traditional IaC and AI-provisioned infrastructure.

"AI is changing how software is built, but infrastructure remains one of the biggest constraints on speed, governance, and reliability," said Kowall. "As AI moves into production workflows, teams need trusted control planes that enforce policy, preserve auditability, and reduce the risk of hallucinated or unsafe changes reaching real environments. With its open source foundation and Spacelift Intelligence, Spacelift is well positioned to define what an AI-native infrastructure control plane should become. I'm excited to join the team and help shape the next phase of the product and the category."

About Spacelift

Spacelift is the infrastructure orchestration platform built for the AI-accelerated software era, managing the full lifecycle for both traditional IaC and AI-provisioned infrastructure. Spacelift Intelligence adds an AI-powered layer for natural-language provisioning, diagnostics, and operational insights across both traditional and AI-driven workflows, helping organizations deliver secure, compliant infrastructure at scale. Spacelift works with tools like Terraform, OpenTofu, CloudFormation, Pulumi, and Ansible. Visit spacelift.io/customers to see how Duolingo, Figma, Moody's, Checkout.com, 1Password, Redfin, and others manage infrastructure for the AI-accelerated software era with Spacelift.

Media Contact:
Cristin Connelly
Cathey Communications for Spacelift
cristin@cathey.co

SOURCE Spacelift