Mike Carter
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 A big data engineer job description has to state the daily data volume, the platform with its Spark, Hadoop, and Java versions, and whether the hire will run the cluster or move off it. Our 2026 salary guide puts mid-level base pay between $134,000 and $152,000, and seniors land … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 Informatica developer interview questions in 2026 should test how a candidate proved a migrated mapping still produced the same numbers, which Informatica products they actually worked in, and what their old PowerCenter jobs could not carry to the cloud. Syntax questions about transformation types are answerable from any certification … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 A project manager in the United States earns a median of $102,320 a year, going by Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data from May 2025, and half the field lands between $78,440 and $133,100. What most salary pages leave out is industry. The same federal job code pays a … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 You retain contractors through the end of an assignment by keeping the pay rate in line with the market, keeping the work inside the scope they accepted, and telling them early what happens after the end date. Perks barely register. The technical contractors we see quit early mostly go … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 An LLM engineer job description should say which layer of the model the hire owns (API integration, self-hosted serving, or the weights) and who runs the upgrade when a provider retires the model underneath your product. For the build seat most companies actually need, expect a base of $150,000 … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 Direct sourcing fills contingent roles from a private talent pool a company already owns, usually alumni, retirees, and silver-medalist applicants, while a staffing agency recruits people the company has no relationship with. Neither one is a program by itself. The decision worth your time is which requisitions go down … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 Most companies hiring after layoffs rebuild with contract talent first, because contractors restore capacity in weeks without betting a permanent headcount line on demand that hasn’t proven itself yet. Permanent reqs come back later, once the work has shown up two quarters in a row. Run in that order, … Read more
By Mike Carter, Director of Partnership Success, KORE1 Good iOS developer job descriptions in 2026 spend their words on the app: its SwiftUI and UIKit split, the oldest iOS version it supports, the Apple frameworks it relies on, and who handles App Review. Swift, Xcode, and “five years of experience” show up on every iOS … Read more
By Mike Carter, Director of Partnership Success, KORE1 Splunk engineer interviews in 2026 should test licensing judgment, data onboarding decisions, and how a candidate diagnoses a broken search, not SPL syntax anyone can memorize from a certification guide. The title gets used for three different jobs, and most interview loops only screen for one of … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 Contractor headcount planning for 2027 means setting a target contractor-to-employee ratio for your IT org, then building a model that flexes that ratio with project pipeline, budget cycles, and hiring freezes instead of guessing every quarter. Most IT leaders treat that ratio as an accident, whatever mix of approved … Read more
