MongoDB Expands Product Leadership to Accelerate Growth and Innovation

MongoDB, Inc. announced the expansion of its product leadership team with two executive appointments. Pablo Stern will join the company as CPO, AI and emerging products, and Ben Cefalo, a longtime MongoDB product leader, has been named CPO, core products. Jim Scharf continues in his role as CTO. Stern, Cefalo, and Scharf will report to CJ Desai, president and CEO.

“MongoDB’s innovation agenda is aggressive,” said Desai. “We are driving significant innovation across our core database products while simultaneously moving with velocity and faster iterations on our emerging products. Having a dedicated leader for each focus area will allow us to deliver what our customers need as they standardize both their core applications and AI workloads on MongoDB. With our new CRO, CCO, and now this expanded product leadership team in place, I’m confident we have the right leaders to establish MongoDB as the generational data platform for the AI era.”

Stern joins MongoDB as CPO, AI and emerging products, with responsibility for the company’s AI product portfolio, including search, vector search, and voyage, as well as future AI products and strategic initiatives with top AI-native and foundation model companies. Most recently, Stern served as EVP & GM, technology workflow products, ServiceNow, where he scaled the IT operations management business from $100 million to more than $1 billion in five years and launched multiple product lines that contributed hundreds of millions to ServiceNow’s revenue. He has also held leadership roles at Symantec and several technology startups. Stern is based in San Francisco, placing him at the center of the global AI ecosystem.

Cefalo has been appointed CPO, core products, overseeing MongoDB’s core product portfolio, including Atlas and Enterprise Advanced. He joined MongoDB in 2017 and most recently served as SVP, head, core products and Atlas Foundational Services. MongoDB’s database offerings have been the primary driver of the company’s growth to $2.46 billion in FY26 revenue and more than 65,200 customers worldwide, and Cefalo will pursue an ambitious product roadmap to build on that foundation as large enterprises and fast-scaling digital natives continue to standardize on MongoDB.

Scharf will continue as CTO, overseeing MongoDB’s engineering organization and global security office. In this role, he will drive execution of the product strategy and roadmap across both core and emerging products, while ensuring the security, durability, availability, and performance the world’s most demanding organizations depend on.