
Engineering Unblocked · 2026-01-07 · 54 min
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.