Practical guidance for employers hiring engineers — from writing effective job descriptions and screening technical candidates to structuring competitive offers and onboarding engineering talent successfully.
By Gregg Flecke, Senior Talent Acquisition Partner at KORE1 When you’re not technical, you hire engineers by borrowing the judgment you don’t have, through a paid work-sample test, a trusted engineer sitting in on your interviews, and reference checks that dig into what the person actually shipped. You will not learn to read code in … Read more
Hiring an engineering manager in 2026 means deciding which tier you actually need (first-line, second-line, or director), then testing for management judgment that barely shows up on a resume, with most well-scoped searches closing in six to ten weeks. Get the tier right and the search is ordinary. Get it wrong and you pay director … Read more
Brent crude fell below $82 a barrel in June 2026 as Middle East tension eased, and for Southern California’s aerospace, defense, and energy employers, cheaper fuel plus less uncertainty is the strongest hiring-confidence signal we’ve seen this year. Lower input costs and a calmer outlook tend to unlock the headcount and capital budgets that volatility … Read more
The director of engineering title is where the salary databases quietly stop working, because the seat sits one rung above the engineers most of those sites are actually pricing. If you want the level above this one, start with our VP of Engineering salary guide. This page is about the director number, and why finance … Read more
Hiring a VP of engineering in 2026 means deciding whether you need the seat at all, budgeting a $215K to $360K base by funding stage, and running a 10 to 16 week search that grades org-building, not raw coding. That one early decision, need the seat or don’t, saves more money than any negotiating tactic … Read more
Palantir Layoffs 2026: Defense AI Engineering Map Palantir is not running mass layoffs in 2026. Revenue grew 85 percent last quarter and the company is still hiring. The talent movement that actually matters is the bidding war over its Forward Deployed Engineers, now getting pulled toward Anduril, Anthropic, OpenAI, and a wave of cleared defense … Read more
HubSpot Layoffs 2026: SaaS Engineering Talent Lands Where HubSpot has not run a mass layoff in 2026. Its big cut was January 2023, when it let go of about 500 people, 7 percent of staff. Today it is hiring. What is actually moving senior HubSpot engineers into the market is quieter: an AI-leaner headcount posture, … Read more
Spotify Layoffs 2026: Audio/Streaming Engineering Map Spotify has not filed a 2026 mass layoff, but an early-2026 podcast cut, the agentic-AI shift toward fewer hands-on coders, and leftover attrition from the 2023 reductions keep pushing senior audio and streaming engineers into the market. Their resumes split into six skill profiles. Apple, Netflix, YouTube Music, Amazon, … Read more
Adobe Layoffs 2026: Creative Software Engineering Map Adobe has not filed a 2026 mass-layoff notice, but rolling PIPs and selective re-orgs across Creative Cloud, Substance 3D, Frame.io, and Document Cloud are pushing 200 to 400 creative software engineers into the open market per quarter. Most resumes split into six skill profiles. Figma, Canva, Runway, Black … Read more
By Robert Ardell Hiring a machine learning engineer in 2026 means picking the production lane first (classical ML, deep learning, or LLM-adjacent fine-tuning), budgeting $160K–$235K mid-level and $230K–$340K senior, and running a four-round loop that tests production debugging, not just whiteboard math. Most clean searches close in five to nine weeks. Robert Ardell here. Twenty … Read more
