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

Podcast

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

Spotify

Apple

Youtube

Ganesh Datta
Host
CTO & Co-founder of Cortex
Tamar Bercovici
VP of Engineering

April 9, 2026

In This Episode

When Tamar Bercovici joined Box, the engineering team consisted of just 30 people. In the 15 years since, she's worked through every level of the leadership track in the organization and is currently the VP of Engineering. She leads the core platform, which is the backend layer that storage, search, metadata, and Box's AI capabilities all run on.

In this episode of Braintrust, Tamar and Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta get into what the job actually requires at each level from IC to VP, why the transition to a director-level role catches people off guard in a way the manager transition doesn't, and how platform teams make the case for their value when nothing they build has a user-facing feature attached to it.

You’ll learn

Tamar describes sitting down to write her first self-evaluation as a manager and genuinely not knowing what to put. What she did, or what the team did? That confusion resolves once you accept that what you're accountable for is the team's results instead of what you shipped.
As a manager, you're optimizing within constraints. As a director, you're responsible for the constraints themselves. If you see a structural problem and don't fix it, nobody else will.
You can't build a strategic roadmap without deeply understanding the architecture and trade-offs your team is navigating. That means staying close enough to understand what the team is actually hitting.
For infrastructure teams, the external end user is the primary customer. Internal engineering teams are secondary. Getting that hierarchy right determines how you measure success and how you make the case for headcount.
One engineer using AI effectively produces at the output level of several. The observability, deployment gates, and CI/CD practices that should have existed anyway become load-bearing under that pressure. Teams that already built those practices absorb what AI produces. Teams that didn't are about to find out.

Quotes

"I think what's interesting about AI coding is that it's really pressure testing what you already technically should have had in place."

Tamar Bercovici

VP of Engineering

"Execution is burning down risk. That's a one-to-one. And so it's just going to manifest a little differently based on where in the stack you are."

Tamar Bercovici

VP of Engineering

"If you give [AI] a bad prompt, you're going to get a bad outcome. Just like if a product manager gives you a bad set of requirements or your architect doesn't explain what they want you to do, the engineer's not probably going to do a good job."

Tamar Bercovici

VP of Engineering

Timestamps

(01:36)
Tamar's role at Box and what "core platform" actually means.
(06:34)
How the job changes at each level (IC, manager, director, VP) and where each transition is actually hard.
(16:01)
Why Box has principal architects reporting at the same level as directors.
(18:35)
How to stay technically grounded as a senior leader without pretending you're still an engineer.
(24:29)
AI, reliability, and guardrails for a platform team where downtime has real consequences.
(29:45)
AI as an amplifier: why it makes strong teams stronger and exposes weaknesses in less mature ones.
(39:25)
How platform teams make the case for their value when nothing they build has a feature announcement attached to it.