Tom Kenaley
Chief Data Officer Salary Guide 2026 Last updated: May 27, 2026 | By Tom Kenaley Chief Data Officers in the United States earn a base of $172,000 to $325,000 in 2026, with total compensation reaching $750,000 to $1.6M at Fortune 500 and regulated-industry employers once bonus, long-term incentive plans, and equity refresh stack on top. … Read more
Last updated: May 26, 2026 | By Tom Kenaley Recession-proof tech jobs in 2026 cluster in five buckets: cybersecurity, healthcare IT, government and defense systems, FinOps and cloud cost engineering, and mission-critical data roles. They hold through downturns because the work cannot be paused without legal or revenue consequence. That sentence does a lot of … Read more
Contingency vs Retainer vs Engaged Search: Which Is Right for You? Last updated: May 25, 2026 | By Tom Kenaley Contingency search costs 15 to 25 percent of first-year base and pays only on placement, retained search runs 30 to 35 percent of first-year total comp with a third paid upfront, and engaged search splits … Read more
AMD Layoffs 2026: Where Semiconductor Talent Is Going AMD ran a single ~1,000-person reduction in late 2024 (about 4 percent of a 26,000-person base) and has been net-hiring engineering talent through 2026, with the larger semiconductor layoff story belonging to Intel (25,000+ positions cut), VMware-Broadcom, and the Confluent and Snowflake data-platform reset. The small AMD … Read more
Last updated: May 22, 2026 | By Tom Kenaley Computer vision engineers in 2026 cost $145K to $190K mid-level and $200K to $275K senior in the United States, with autonomous-driving perception and medical-imaging FDA specialists clearing $290K to $410K total comp, and most well-scoped searches closing in 4 to 9 weeks. The discipline is six … Read more
Last updated: May 21, 2026 | By Tom Kenaley Robotics engineers in 2026 cost $150K to $205K mid-level and $205K to $300K senior in the United States, with humanoid and foundation-model specialists clearing $280K to $475K total comp and most well-scoped searches closing in 6 to 12 weeks. Six career tracks sit behind that title … Read more
Scrum Master Interview Questions 2026 Last updated: May 20, 2026 | By Tom Kenaley Scrum master interview questions in 2026 should sort candidates into three profiles first, then run twelve foundational questions plus three or four real scenarios scoped to the team being hired for. Trivia about ceremonies is wasted slot time. The wrong loop … Read more
A 2026 hiring playbook for FPGA engineers across defense, AI infrastructure, HFT, and aerospace — the five-track career split, the clearance variable, $135K–$260K comp bands, AMD Versal / Intel Agilex / Lattice / Microchip sourcing signals, the seven interview questions that predict production readiness, and the four mistakes that drag senior searches past 90 days.
Database Administrator Interview Questions 2026 Last updated: May 18, 2026 | By Tom Kenaley Database administrator interview questions in 2026 should target three archetypes: production DBA, cloud platform DBA, and data engineer with DBA duties. Strong loops run fourteen technical questions plus three hands-on scenarios scoped to the actual stack. The bad loop has fifty … Read more
Prompt Engineer Salary Guide 2026 Last updated: May 17, 2026 | By Tom Kenaley Prompt engineers in the United States earn a base of $95,000 to $206,000 in 2026, with a national average near $129,500 across public salary aggregators. Frontier-lab packages at Anthropic and OpenAI push total compensation past $500,000 once equity and signing money … Read more
