Engineering staffing insights covering mechanical, electrical, biomedical, and systems engineering roles — including hiring trends, salary data, and strategies for building R&D, manufacturing, and product development teams.
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 When acquired engineers leave after retention cliffs pass, backfill bounded work with contract engineers while the permanent org settles, and keep architecture, customer-facing ownership, and audit-facing work with employees. KORE1-placed software engineers bill $91 to $120 an hour, median $105, and the median KORE1 contract assignment … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Review contractor code by the same standard as employee code, and add a trust ramp of reviewed merges from day one, low-risk merges on their own after week two, and an employee owner on anything touching money, PII, or production. The bar never moves. Only the … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Under SOC 2, give a contract engineer day-one access only to what the first ticket needs: a scoped repository, a non-production environment, and named credentials with MFA. Production data, merge rights to protected branches, and break-glass wait for a second reviewer and a written approval, then … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 A mixed team in a regulated codebase works when contractors get the same written answers employees get, covering who owns each decision, who holds which access, who carries the pager, what done means, and how knowledge stays. KORE1’s engagement data puts the median contract assignment at … Read more
A mid-level contract mechanical, electrical, or manufacturing engineer bills about $75 to $94 an hour nationally in 2026. Bill rates by level and metro from the KORE1 Contract Rate Index.
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 AI ownership works when each decision about a model gets one named owner, with product defining a correct answer, data owning what the model learns from, and engineering owning what ships and what rolls back. That split is the core of an AI operating model. Hand … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 A skip-level meeting is a one-on-one or small-group conversation between a leader and their managers’ reports, without the manager present, and it works only when the leader listens for patterns and routes every decision back to its owner. Run it as a listening session, never a … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 Microsoft Maia 300 is Microsoft’s third in-house AI inference chip, due in production in 2027, and it pits Microsoft against Google, Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI for the same small pool of custom-silicon engineers. Microsoft unveiled it on October 12, 2026. The design is done. The fight for the people … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Scope creep is work added or swapped in after a project is committed, and a mid-sprint priority change costs far more than the new work, because the team pays to stop, replan, reload context, and repair what it abandoned. On my worksheet, a six-engineer team taking … Read more
By Jennifer Burdick, Recruiting Manager, KORE1 A mechanical engineer job description should state how the parts are made and in what volume, which code or quality system governs the work, what the release package contains, any export-control limit, and a base range of $84,000 to $145,000. That range covers mid-level through senior engineers in 2026. … Read more
