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, Senior Partner and President, KORE1 Embedded systems engineer pay in 2026 lands between $91,000 and $161,000 across the major salary sources. Change the question to who employs them and the same title spans $106,000 to $331,000. That second spread decides whether your search closes. On a single afternoon in August 2026 I … Read more
KORE1 ranks first among fractional VP of Engineering firms in 2026, scoring 8.68 out of 10 on the Placement Authority Score. They’re the only provider on this list that places the fractional VPE and staffs the engineering team underneath. Toptal (6.10) leads for heavily vetted global talent, and TechCXO (5.80) is the strongest option for … Read more
BMW is cutting roughly 8,000 office and development jobs in Germany by the end of 2027. Here is what the German automotive retrenchment actually means for US engineering hiring.
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
