In this episode, Rob Zuber shares what he’s learned from over a decade as CTO at CircleCI — including why the current market requires CTOs to be more hands-on than ever, and why he doesn’t even know who his competitors are anymore.

Rob explains how his team deliberately encourages AI tool sprawl to find the gaps, how CircleCI went from instant product-market fit to navigating constant transformation, and why boring technology still wins for infrastructure even as everything else changes. He also gets into why AI works as an amplifier that speeds up both good processes and bad ones.

Find the transcript at: https://www.swarmia.com/podcast/rob-zuber-circleci(00:00) Introduction

(01:00) What it means to be a CTO right now

(03:09) The evolution of software development since 2011

(06:07) The mobile revolution and iOS tooling

(08:28) JavaScript frameworks and the rise of containers

(12:03) Staying competitive in a crowded CI/CD market

(15:32) AI is changing everything about software delivery

(18:17) Setting goals and priorities in uncertain times

(28:58) What the board holds CTOs accountable for

(34:27) The ZIRP era and its aftermath

(38:45) Why headcount became the wrong metric

(41:22) AI as an amplifier — for better or worse

(44:03) Will companies without fundamentals survive?

(46:00) The reverse camera problem

(51:52) Do we still need to understand how things work?

Links and mentionsFollow Rob on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robzuber/Follow Rebecca on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rmurphey/

Being a CTO when everything is exploratory with Rob Zuber from CircleCI

Engineering Unblocked