## Elastic Brings in Ashutosh Kulkarni to Lead Product Vision and Engineering

Elastic has appointed Ashutosh Kulkarni as its inaugural Chief Product Officer, marking a significant leadership shift in the search company's trajectory. The move underscores Elastic's commitment to scaling its cloud infrastructure and strengthening its competitive position in enterprise search, observability, and security solutions.

Kulkarni comes with over two decades of enterprise software experience, having held leadership roles at marquee tech companies including McAfee, Akamai, Informatica, and Sun Microsystems. His track record spans multiproduct engineering organizations, cross-functional operations, and go-to-market strategy—areas critical to Elastic's next growth phase.

### Why This Appointment Matters

Reporting directly to founder and CEO Shay Banon, Kulkarni will oversee engineering and product management with a dual focus: driving innovation across Elastic's three core solutions while simultaneously ramping up the Elastic Cloud platform globally. The timing aligns with Elastic's expanded market opportunity and its push to help customers extract real-time insights from massive datasets.

This hire represents the latest in Elastic's recent executive reshuffles, following the appointment of Sally Jenkins as Chief Marketing Officer and Paul Appleby as President of Worldwide Field Operations. Together, they're building out a leadership bench designed to navigate the company through its next scaling phase.

### The Strategic Angle

Elastic's edge lies in offering integrated search, observability, and security capabilities on a single technology stack. Kulkarni's experience building robust engineering teams while collaborating with marketing, field enablement, and pricing functions positions him well to translate this technical advantage into market traction.

Founded in 2012, Elastic operates the Elasticsearch engine and broader Elastic Stack—tools trusted by thousands of organizations worldwide, from Cisco and Goldman Sachs to NASA and The New York Times. With NYSE listing under ticker ESTC, the company continues to invest heavily in cloud-native offerings and enterprise solutions to capitalize on the growing demand for data intelligence at scale.

Kulkarni holds engineering degrees from the University of Mumbai and University of Texas at Austin, plus an MBA from UC Berkeley—credentials that reflect the technical depth and business acumen Elastic's leadership demands.