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 Tom Kenaley, President and Senior Partner, KORE1 Good firmware engineer interview questions in 2026 make a candidate bring up a board that has never run code, defend an update path against a power cut, and say who files the vulnerability report. Mutex versus semaphore only sorts out who revised the night before. Shipping hardware … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 The Senate permitting deal, introduced September 30, 2026, would put most of its new grid work on transmission planners, interconnection engineers, and line designers, but almost none of that work lands before 2027, even if the bill passes in November. For permitting reform, the engineering jobs question … Read more
By Jennifer Burdick, Recruiting Manager, KORE1 An electrical engineer job description should name the voltage class, the deliverable the engineer hands off, whether that work carries a PE seal, the field and energized-work split, and a base range, roughly $90,000 to $158,000 in 2026. Most postings skip all five. They describe electrical engineering in general, … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 Schneider Electric’s $22.6 billion deal for PTC won’t change who you hire for Creo and Windchill until it closes, expected by Q3 2027, but it makes engineers who connect product data to factory operations more valuable starting now. The day-to-day software stays the same for a while. The market … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, President and Senior Partner, KORE1 The electrical engineer interview questions that work in 2026 make a candidate produce a number, mark up a schematic, and explain when they would refuse to work on something energized. Definitions of Ohm’s law and power factor tell you who studied. They don’t tell you who can … Read more
By Mike Carter, Director of Partnership Success, KORE1 Embedded software engineers earn $125,000 to $150,000 at mid-level and $155,000 to $205,000 at senior in 2026, base only. Published US averages for the title run from $91,755 to $174,754. That $83,000 gap between two averages is the reason bands get approved that nobody accepts. Four different … Read more
By Jennifer Burdick, Recruiting Manager, KORE1 Automation engineer interviews in 2026 should test startup behavior, safety judgment, and OT network sense. PLC trivia is free. Anybody can memorize scan cycle mechanics in a weekend, and the plants that screen on it keep hiring people who cannot run a commissioning. I run delivery at KORE1 and … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 Automation engineer salaries in 2026 run roughly $72,000 to $162,000 depending on platform depth, industry, and hours, with published US averages clustering between $88,000 and $123,000. The spread is not noise. It is eight published figures measuring at least three different jobs, and not one of them … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, President and Senior Partner, KORE1 Hiring an automation engineer starts with deciding who the seat reports to, because that one choice sets the platform experience, the pay band, and which candidates ever apply. Plant floor, engineering group, or IT. Three genuinely different jobs wear the title, and every published salary figure blends … Read more
By Mike Carter, Director of Partnership Success, KORE1 Hire a SCADA engineer by screening for who owns the path into the control network, not who can build an HMI screen, because remote access is where these systems fail in 2026. Base pay clusters near $123,000 across every major aggregator, and a properly scoped search closes … Read more
