Current Role and Company Association
Dylan Etkin is the Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Founder of Sleuth, a leading engineering efficiency platform specializing in deployment-based metrics and engineering team productivity. Sleuth positions itself as an operating system for engineering teams, designed to help achieve predictable software delivery and alignment with broader business objectives. The platform focuses on measuring, improving efficiency, and reducing change failure rates and mean time to recovery (MTTR) through tooling integrations such as PagerDuty, Statuspage, Blameless, and FireHydrant.
Professional Background and Expertise
Dylan is an experienced technology leader and engineer with over 15 years building developer tools. His technical leadership is rooted in his tenure at Atlassian, where he was one of the company’s first 20 employees and served as a founding engineer and the first architect of Jira, Atlassian’s flagship project-tracking tool widely adopted across DevOps and software engineering teams globally. In addition to Jira, he contributed to other Atlassian products, including Bitbucket and Statuspage.
He has a direct track record of managing engineering teams, and former colleagues highlight him as a fantastic mentor and team leader with considerable enthusiasm for his work. His background encompasses both software development and engineering management, with a clear emphasis on bridging engineering processes with measurable business outcomes via operational metrics.
Industry Positioning and Thought Leadership
Dylan frequently participates in industry discussions and podcasts focused on engineering metrics, developer tools, and engineering team productivity. Recent interviews and talks include feature appearances on:
- Software Engineering Daily (Oct 2024) discussing the future of engineering teams and Sleuth’s role,
- Dice Tech Connects (2023) providing insights on building developer tools and engineering efficiency,
- Corey Quinn’s Screaming in the Cloud podcast (Nov 2024),
- Multiple YouTube presentations on engineering metrics, team alignment, and moving beyond traditional dashboard metrics.
These engagements demonstrate Dylan’s active role as a thought leader in engineering efficiency, DevOps tool innovation, and digital transformation for development teams.
Notable Achievements and Impact
- Pioneered architectural foundations of Jira, influencing one of the most widely used software development and project management tools.
- Transitioned a side project evolving from internal use at Bitbucket to a venture-backed startup: Sleuth, focused on solving critical pain points in engineering delivery.
- Positioned Sleuth as a platform capable of integrating with major incident management tools, thereby enabling engineering teams to reduce failure rates and accelerate incident recovery.
- Recognized for his leadership qualities, including thoughtful communication strategies and effective mentorship.
Educational Background
- Attended Arizona State University (specific degree not detailed).
Professional Interests and Focus Areas
- Engineering productivity and efficiency metrics,
- Deployment and change management tracking,
- Developer experience enhancement through tools that satisfy both developers and engineering managers,
- Aligning engineering output with business goals,
- Scaling development processes sustainably beyond traditional dashboards and siloed metrics.
This profile synthesizes publicly available data on Dylan Etkin’s role, background, and professional focus, emphasizing his extensive technical and leadership experience within software engineering tools, with direct relevance to driving engineering team efficiency and operational excellence.
