Tom Kenaley
Hiring a database administrator in 2026 runs about $95K to $135K mid-level and $135K to $185K for a senior or cloud specialist, and what drives the cost is which of four different DBA jobs you actually need. Get the type wrong and you pay twice: once for the salary, again for the rehire. The cleanest … Read more
Compensation benchmarking is the process of comparing your pay against current market data, then setting ranges by role, level, and location so your offers land where you want them to. A pay strategy turns that data into a decision about whether you lead the market, match it, or trail it on base and then make … Read more
Already mapped the rest of the product ladder? Our companion reads price the rungs below this one: the senior product manager salary guide and the broader product manager salary guide for 2026. Principal Product Manager Salary Guide 2026 By Tom Kenaley Principal product managers in the United States earn $210,000 to $300,000 base in 2026, … Read more
In 2026 the software engineer job market split in two, with a glut of senior generalists facing long searches on one side and a drought of AI infrastructure specialists still commanding around $250K on the other. Both conditions live under the same job title, often inside the same company, which is why “the SWE market” … Read more
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 before you open the search: pick offense or defense, fix the reporting line, set a budget near $300K to $450K total comp, and plan ten to fourteen weeks for a real executive search. Everything else, the sourcing, the interview loop, the references, follows from … 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
