People who are successful are often those who can adapt and keep up, which is why it doesn’t really matter what direction you go in.
Tamar’s impact:
Leading the Database and Content Infrastructure teams at Box, Tamar Bercovici has grown Box’s database infrastructure from a single host architecture storing hundreds of millions of records to a highly distributed service storing hundreds of billions of records and serving upwards of a million queries per second at peak.
This scalable infrastructure is the underpinning for the Box File System. Comprised of tens of billions of files and folders, it is one of the largest multi-tenant, collaborative, cloud-based file systems in the world. Recently, Tamar has evolved Box’s database and content infrastructure to enable new content management use cases, which have paved the way for Box to establish itself as a leader in the cloud content management space. Throughout the process, she’s found innovative solutions for supporting sophisticated and performant querying capabilities over customer-defined metadata at scale.
Tamar's focus on reliability shows up in Box's best-in-class churn rate of 108% and uptime greater than 99%. Additionally, her backend ingenuity has technically enabled Box to scale its content footprint to serve the 92K enterprise customers (including 70% of the Fortune 500!) it does today.
Why she’s an Up-and-Comer:
During her eight-year tenure at Box, Tamar has demonstrated her ability to scale both Box’s infrastructure and the teams running it. After developing the first scalability layer for the Box Database Infrastructure, Tamar founded the Database Infrastructure team, and has overseen and directed the growth of both. And in 2015, Tamar led a large-scale cross-functional effort tackling challenges and opportunities at all layers of the stack, leading to the database tier being one of the most stable infrastructure components at Box today.
In her leadership of the Content Infrastructure team today, Tamar works with stakeholders across the company to refine strategy requirements, define a Content Platform capable of scaling to meet today's use cases, and enable the development to address tomorrow’s use cases. Tamar also leads the company’s annual hackathons and speaks on technology and technical leadership at leading conferences. Next up? Tamar is leading an engineering-wide effort evolving the Box hosting strategy, and upleveling the operating model for Box infrastructure.
What’s your number one piece of advice for people just starting their tech careers?
Optimize for your rate of learning. Tech is so broad with so many different technologies, applications, and different career paths you can take. When you’re just getting started, these decisions can seem monumental, and it feels like you need to think ten steps ahead. But technology is not static - it’s rapidly changing and evolving. People who are successful are often those who can adapt and keep up, which is why it doesn’t really matter what direction you go in. Your ability to jump into a new domain, get your bearings, and build on your past experience to rapidly deliver value is the key skill you will find yourself leveraging time and again.
Your ability to jump into a new domain, get your bearings, and build on your past experience to rapidly deliver value is the key skill you will find yourself leveraging time and again.
Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
One of the things I find most exciting about working in technology is the continual process of going into uncharted territory. The problems we’re working on today, couldn’t have been imagined ten years ago. In ten years I see myself still throwing myself at new challenges, still learning, and still enjoying the ride.
