Tom Kenaley
By Tom Kenaley, President & Senior Partner, KORE1 Build a data team in hiring order: start with one analyst or analytics engineer to make your existing data usable, add a data engineer when pipelines break, and hire a data scientist only after you have clean data. A dedicated data leader comes around four to six … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, President & Senior Partner, KORE1 The AI engineer career path climbs from junior at zero to two years ($110,000 to $145,000 base) through mid and senior, then splits into a staff or principal track and an engineering-management track, with senior base pay reaching $290,000. What sets it apart from the machine learning … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, Senior Partner and President, KORE1 Hiring a Salesforce architect in 2026 means paying $150,000 to $260,000 for a senior, deciding first whether you need a technical or a functional architect, and screening hard for the discipline to tell the platform no. A focused search closes in three to six weeks. Most drag … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, Senior Partner and President, KORE1 A data scientist finds what your data can tell you. An ML engineer makes that finding run in production at scale. One hands back insight and a prototype model, the other ships a system that stays accurate under real traffic. Both write Python. Same language, sure. Only … Read more
How Long Does It Take to Hire a Product Manager in 2026? Hiring a product manager in 2026 takes about 7 to 11 weeks through an internal search and 3 to 5 weeks through a specialized agency, with seniority, product surface, and interview-loop length driving most of the spread. Generalist and mid-level roles close faster. … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, Senior Partner and President, KORE1 Hiring a cloud security engineer in 2026 means budgeting roughly $130,000 to $215,000 base for mid-to-senior talent, naming your primary cloud before you post, and expecting a two-to-four-week search in a market where almost none of these people are unemployed. The money is the part everyone fixates … Read more
How Long Does It Take to Hire a Data Scientist in 2026? Hiring a data scientist takes about 7 to 12 weeks through an internal search in 2026, and 4 to 6 weeks through a specialized agency, with production requirements and seniority driving most of the spread. Applied and analytics roles close faster because the … Read more
By Tom Kenaley Hiring a machine learning engineer in 2026 runs $210,000 to $370,000 in fully loaded year-one cost for a mid-to-senior US hire, once you add payroll tax, benefits, training compute, data tooling, and recruiting fees on top of base pay. Base salary is the only line most budgets plan around. It rarely clears … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, Senior Partner and President, KORE1 A business intelligence analyst in 2026 earns roughly $88,000 to $150,000, and most searches fill in two to four weeks once you know which kind of BI hire you actually need. The mix-up between an analyst, a data analyst, and a developer stalls these searches more often … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, Senior Partner and President, KORE1 Hiring a security architect in 2026 runs about $135,000 to $300,000-plus depending on track and seniority, and a focused search usually closes in 17 to 30 days once you know which architect type you actually need. The budget is the easy part. The hard part is telling … Read more
