Tom Kenaley
Hiring an AI engineer in 2026 costs $290,000 to $480,000 in fully loaded year-one expense for a mid-to-senior US hire, once you stack salary, payroll tax, benefits, GPU compute, LLM API spend, recruiting fees, and a long ramp. Base pay is only forty to fifty-five percent of the total. Direct-hire agency fees sit at 20 … Read more
To hire a chief data officer in 2026, define the mandate first: pick offense or defense, fix the reporting line, budget $300K to $450K total comp, and plan ten to fourteen weeks for the search. Everything else, the sourcing, the interview loop, the references, follows from those four decisions. Get them wrong and you will … Read more
Last updated: June 6, 2026 | By Tom Kenaley Hiring a Java developer in 2026 means first deciding which Java developer you need, then budgeting roughly $115K to $185K for most mid-to-senior US hires and running a four-to-six-week search that tests JVM and Spring judgment over keyword matching. Java turned thirty this year. Sit with … Read more
A big data engineer builds the large-scale distributed systems, Spark and Kafka and the lakehouse underneath them, that move and process data at a volume normal pipelines choke on. Plan for a 2026 base of $115K to $200K depending on level, real distributed-systems experience as the non-negotiable, and a four to eight week search to … Read more
An analytics engineer owns the dbt and Snowflake modeling layer, the tested SQL that turns raw warehouse tables into datasets your team can trust. Plan for a base of $115K to $175K in 2026, dbt and a cloud warehouse as the non-negotiable stack, and a four to seven week search to fill the seat well. … Read more
By Tom Kenaley Hiring a product manager in 2026 means picking the right archetype for your stage (Associate, PM, Senior PM, Group PM, or Director), setting a U.S. base band of $135K to $175K for mid-level and $190K to $260K for senior, and running a four-round loop that grades discovery, prioritization under pressure, and the … Read more
By Tom Kenaley Hiring a prompt engineer in 2026 means accepting the title has split into four working jobs (LLM application engineer with prompt depth, eval and red-team engineer, agent and tool-use designer, or prompt-ops generalist for non-engineering teams). Budget $130K to $185K mid-level and $200K to $290K senior, then run a four-round loop that … Read more
By Tom Kenaley Hiring a CTO in 2026 means picking the right archetype for your stage (founder-coder, architect, scaling platform, or strategist). Set a band of $260K to $400K base for a Series B through C full-time CTO, and running a six-step search that grades technical strategy, leadership, and the ability to say no to … Read more
If you are opening a Senior PM req, our full 2026 hiring playbook walks the five-level ladder, the JD filter, and the four-round interview loop: how to hire a product manager in 2026. Senior Product Manager Salary Guide 2026 By Tom Kenaley Senior product managers in the United States earn $165,000 to $245,000 base in … Read more
By Tom Kenaley To hire a technical product manager (TPM) in 2026, scope the role by who pays when the call is wrong (internal engineers vs external users). Set a comp band of $145K to $215K for mid-level and $210K to $310K for senior, and run a four-round loop that grades system-design judgment, prioritization under … Read more
