Jack sits down with Tapan Patel, Gearset DevOps Leader for 2026 and DevOps Lead for the Salesforce practice at Braze, a publicly traded omnichannel platform where every change management decision is subject to SOX audit scrutiny.
Tapan brings a rare blend of project delivery experience, release management rigour, and genuine passion for building DevOps not just as a set of processes, but as a culture.
The episode is a masterclass in phased, people-first DevOps rollout. Tapan walks through exactly how he’s taken Braze from change sets and manual deployments to a governed, audit-ready CI/CD pipeline over the past year and a half — breaking it down into four distinct phases and sharing what actually worked, what took longer than expected, and where he’s headed next. Tapan shares his rounded take on AI, including where it’s already adding value in the pipeline today, why agentic autonomy in prod is still a way off, and how Claude, Jira and Gearset’s reporting API are becoming a powerful combination for DevOps KPI tracking.
