Jim Scharf

Chief Technology Officer at MongoDB

Greater Seattle Area, United States

About Jim Scharf

Jim Scharf is Chief Technology Officer at MongoDB. Location: Greater Seattle Area, United States.

I joined MongoDB as CTO in October 2023, after 17 years at AWS. MongoDB had extraordinary product-market fit and a world-class developer community. I helped establish an even higher bar of engineering: a clear quality bar, delivery the field could bank on, a deeper security posture, and a credible answer to what a database company can become in the AI era. MongoDB 8.0 was the first proof point: roughly 25% better aggregate throughput and latency, 36% faster reads, 59% higher update throughput, and up to 50x faster resharding. I believe that Security is absolutely critical to earning the trust of customers. I stood up MongoDB's Global Security Office, hired our CISO, and represent security to our Board Security Committee. Our developers are no longer only people - builders are now both humans and agents. Agents read our docs, call our APIs, and build against our platform, which changes what "developer experience" even means. I led our product and technology organization through the acquisition of Voyage AI, and proudly announced our Atlas MCP server, GA of Atlas Embedding & Reranking API, and GA of Automated Voyage AI Embeddings at MongoDB.local Build Fest. This brings Voyage embedding native support for high-performance retrieval models directly within MongoDB Atlas Before MongoDB, I was one of the earliest members of AWS. I was the founding owner of six services - including AWS Identity and Access Management and the AWS Key Management Service - served as GM of Amazon DynamoDB (where external revenue grew 488% over three years), and finished as VP of AWS Identity, where IAM enforced access control for the AWS cloud at over a billion requests per second across 20 regions, public and top secret. Along the way I led organizations up to 900 people, carried full P&L for businesses growing 70%+ year over year, and I am an author on 20 US cloud computing patents. I write regularly about engineering leadership - trade-offs, constraints, and why cost is a design dimension most software teams ignore. I am an engineer by training who had to learn the languages of product, sales, and finance the hard way (after getting it wrong many times), and I try to teach what I learned.

Skills

  • Cloud Computing
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Software Development

Additional experience

  • Caregiving

    Career break

    June 2022 – September 2023

Education

  • BS, Rutgers University