Well, good morning. How is everybody? Quick show of hands, how many of you have ever used a streaming app to listen to music, a podcast, or entertainment? Get your hands up. Okay, keep your hands up if in the last five years you've experienced a glitch with that app. Oh, not bad. When that happens, it's annoying and it causes you to question why you chose this app or brand. Often we move on to something else. For those of us running companies, incidents that impact your customer experience are on the rise, up 43% in the last year. A major incident on average costs nearly a million dollars because we rely on technology to drive revenue and profitability. So this has become a real business challenge. The reason I'm here: I'm Jennifer Tejada, CEO of PagerDuty. We help over two-thirds of the Fortune 100 and half of the Fortune 500 improve operational resilience through automating digital operations. And I'm thrilled to have with me today Tyson Singer, VP of Technology and Platforms at Spotify. Tyson has the challenge of worrying about 650 million listeners. He owns infrastructure, technology strategy, and developer experience. Tyson, you've been at Spotify for nearly nine years. Technology has evolved a lot. How have you thought about operations and how are you leveraging AI to improve the quality of the products and services for your end customers?
Yeah. So, um I saw hands go down on the have you experienced app, which made me feel good. Not when their hands went down because most likely folks are actually using Spotify. We do have a resilient system. Things have changed a lot versus when I started nine years ago. First and foremost, it starts with the code. Bad code means more incidents, but that's not happening at Spotify. There's some reasons behind that. More folks are generating a larger portion of their code with agents, which introduces higher variability and more code. It has been important pre-AI and during the AI revolution to have standards in the process. When I joined, the Spotify model was basically chaos. There wasn't any standardization. My job was to introduce more structure and standards into the software development process, making the code more consistent using the same frameworks and platforms. Today we have roughly 100 million lines of custom code and depend on about a billion lines. You can't treat code like a pet; you have to treat it like cattle. That means having tools to understand and set standards and transform code. We use a tool called Backstage, our internal developer portal, and an approach called fleet management to change code at scale.
Yeah. So suddenly the switch from how we treated servers like pets to cattle applies to code as well. Using Backstage and fleet management, and now with high-quality LLMs, we can change that hundred million lines of code at scale to address issues on resiliency, security, and cost. It's much faster and more predictable, but with LLMs it's nerve-wracking because the blast radius can be large. That's the trade-off. And when you showed up and announced removing autonomy and deploying standards, everybody was thrilled and jumped on board. Well, not entirely. We used change management techniques. In fact, we hired a marketing team to market internally to defragment our technology ecosystem. Everything starts with code, but then operations come in. That's where PagerDuty has gotten something right. Engineers only spend a couple hours coding each day; there are many operational needs. We run an ops and squad model where every developer operates their code. Every incident disrupts developer flow. So tools to identify root cause and remediate quickly are important. That's some work you're doing at PagerDuty. You want to tell us a little bit about what you're doing?
What we're really trying to do is make life easier for the developer in service of a more resilient experience for the end user. We leverage AI and automation across our platform. We have a large open API ecosystem connecting to 700 popular tools. The platform detects potential issues, consolidates and correlates them, and intelligently orchestrates them to the right teams or agents. The vision is to go from event detection to code change before the end user notices. It's about automating digital operations to build a more resilient organization. People are imperfect, software is imperfect, so the outcome will be imperfect. You have to anticipate the unexpected. Teams like Spotify that think ahead are in a better position to react and learn.
Yeah. I like how you frame it in terms of imperfection. We have plenty of imperfection at Spotify. It's important to identify where you're doing the right things. When I started, I had an indoctrination program for every new employee on the golden path. Now we represent those golden paths in Backstage, not just for people but for agents too. With 50,000 data pipelines, LLMs need to see the good stuff, not garbage. So we have a custom AI chatbot trained on golden standards to nudge people and machines towards standardization. That's part of our external offering of Backstage called Portal, with a chatbot called Iika. PagerDuty uses Backstage for onboarding and standardization. It's interesting to see a consumer-focused company like Spotify building and distributing their own infrastructure solution. This is a bit of Spotify's AWS moment.
And you make it sound so easy, so matter-of-fact and calm. I was talking to Mike Hamilton, CIO of Cloudflare, and he said simple is never easy, today's new solution is tomorrow's tech debt. So does Spotify have any tech debt? How do you think about tech debt and how are you leveraging AI to burn it down?
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Tejada, J. (2025, October 1). Jennifer Tejada, CEO&Chairperson, PagerDuty: Never Miss a Beat Building Reliable Experiences with AI [Interview transcript]. RAISE Summit. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1054777/
MLA
Jennifer Tejada. "Jennifer Tejada, CEO&Chairperson, PagerDuty: Never Miss a Beat Building Reliable Experiences with AI." RAISE Summit, 1 Oct. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1054777/.
BibTeX
@misc{tejada2025_1054777,
author = {Jennifer Tejada},
title = {Jennifer Tejada, CEO\&Chairperson, PagerDuty: Never Miss a Beat Building Reliable Experiences with AI},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, RAISE Summit. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {oct},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1054777/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
