How AI is changing the engineering leader's job with Rob Zuber CTO at CircleCI

Rob Zuber has been CTO at CircleCI for nearly 12 years, watching software engineering evolve through the SaaS era, the mobile era, and now the agentic era. This time he says the rate of change is different. And so is what it means to lead. In this episode, Rob and host Emma Webb get into what happens to an engineering leader when their expertise is suddenly irrelevant, why Rob's answer was to get hands-on and start building again, and why being AI native isn't a destination you ever actually reach. They also cover the CI debate nobody can agree on, the token cost tension every engineering leader is quietly navigating, and how CircleCI is hiring differently in the agentic era. Rob's closing thought: we're not going to plan the new way of working. We're going to live it. If you lead an engineering org trying to figure out how your role and your team need to evolve, this one's for you. Have someone you want us to interview or a topic you want us to cover? Let us know on X or LinkedIn.