Tom Kenaley
By Tom Kenaley, Senior Partner and President, KORE1 To hire a VP of Product in 2026, scope the seat against your stage, budget $215,000 to $285,000 in base salary plus equity, run a judgment-based interview loop, and check references hard. Most product-leadership searches take eight to fourteen weeks once the role is scoped right. The … Read more
Pricing the rest of the product ladder? The rung below this seat is in our group product manager salary guide, and the seat above it is the VP product salary guide for 2026. This page is about the director number, and why the hiring manager and finance keep walking in with two of them. Director … Read more
By Tom Kenaley The data engineer career path runs from junior at zero to two years, then mid-level, then senior, before it forks into two tracks: staff or principal on the technical side, or manager and architect on the leadership side. Base pay climbs from roughly $80,000 to past $220,000 along the way. That fork … Read more
Price most engineers by what they cost you. Price a security engineer by what the empty chair costs you. Different math. Hiring a cybersecurity engineer in the U.S. runs roughly $165,000 to $320,000 in the first year, once you add fully loaded pay, recruiting or agency fees, the cost of the seat sitting open, and … Read more
The AI product manager career path runs from associate PM to AI PM, then senior, staff or principal, and on to director, usually across eight to twelve years. The jump into AI rarely turns on how long you have carried the title. It turns on whether you can read a model evaluation and decide if … Read more
Staff Engineer Salary Guide 2026 By Tom Kenaley Staff engineers in the United States earn $190,000 to $260,000 base in 2026, with total compensation reaching $350,000 to $700,000 at large technology employers once equity and bonus stack on top. It is the first rung where pay stops tracking how fast you write code and starts … Read more
Hiring an app developer in the United States in 2026 typically costs $90,000 to $300,000 for a full-time first-year hire, or about $55 to $225 an hour on contract. That full-time range stacks salary, recruiting, and the mobile-only overhead nobody puts on the offer letter. It’s wide for a reason. An iOS specialist building a … Read more
Ask three engineering leaders what a developer costs and you’ll get three answers. All of them honest. None of them the number finance is actually asking for. Hiring a software developer in the United States in 2026 runs roughly $95,000 to $330,000 in the first year, once you stack fully loaded pay, recruiting, and the … Read more
Most DevOps reqs name a salary and call it a budget. Those are not the same document. Hiring a DevOps engineer in 2026 costs a U.S. employer roughly $180,000 to $390,000 in the first year, once you stack fully loaded compensation, recruiting or agency fees, the cost of the open seat, and onboarding. Salary is … Read more
The top emerging tech hubs in 2026 are Raleigh-Durham, Salt Lake City, Nashville, Denver, Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Phoenix, Tampa, Columbus, and Huntsville. Each is adding tech jobs faster than the coastal giants, at a lower cost. Austin used to be on this kind of list. In 2015 it was the scrappy upstart everybody whispered about. … Read more
