Rob Zuber has been CTO at CircleCI for just over 12 years. He came in through an acquisition, shipped a PR that took down production in his first week, and now runs an engineering org of a little over 100 people while still writing code most days on a small team inside it.
He's also doing something almost nobody else is doing right now: hiring junior engineers on purpose, through a program built specifically for new grads. A year ago he was saying the opposite in public, and he'll tell you exactly where to find the receipts.
We got into what changed, what breaks when half your org adopts agents and half doesn't, and the one question Rob thinks separates the companies pulling ahead from everyone else.
What you'll learn:
Why Rob restarted junior hiring while the rest of the market stopped, and what the program actually looks like
The reason this moment is a leveler, and why "I don't know, let's figure it out" beats "come along little one, let me teach you"
How Rob interviews for comfort with the unknown, and the specific follow-up that makes a rehearsed answer fall apart
The email from a stranger that changed how he talks about failure across cultures
Reframing bets and hypotheses so a team stops guarding against being wrong
The real friction in AI adoption: not tooling, but one engineer deciding another one is reckless
Why Rob stopped deleting the agent's extraneous comments
Readable for humans versus readable for agents, and why he thinks great agent-readable code is something we'll discover rather than design
The ambiguity gap, and the 2 choices you have when your team can't absorb more change
Why nobody is managing your ability to handle the next level, and what that means if you're aiming at the CTO seat
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