From IC to VP: Engineering Leadership at Every Level, with Box's Tamar Bercovici

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Tamar Bercovici, VP of Engineering at Box, who spent 15 years at the company growing from senior IC to leading its core platform organization, to talk about what engineering leadership looks like at each level of the org.

Tamar walks through how the job fundamentally changes as you move from manager to director to VP, including a key shift at director level where you stop working within constraints and start reshaping them. She and Ganesh dig into how AI is less a new challenge than a pressure test on existing engineering practices, and why teams with strong CI/CD and observability will move faster while undisciplined teams will struggle. Tamar also shares a mentorship pairing program where engineers already effective with AI coach those still learning, sometimes reversing the usual seniority dynamic. And she explains how Box's platform team connects internal standardization directly to external customer value through security, access control, and product cohesion.