From IC to VP: Engineering Leadership at Every Level, with Box's Tamar Bercovici
00:00 Intro
10:27 How the tools and scope of leadership change at each level
17:37 Why principal architects report at the same level as directors
24:28 AI pressure-tests the operational rigor your team should already have
32:34 The mentorship program where junior engineers coach staff engineers on AI
43:40 How platform teams connect internal standardization to end-user value
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.
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