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 Tom Kenaley, President and Senior Partner, KORE1 An engineering org chart runs on six staffing ratios, and only one of them has real research behind it. That one is span of control, and it lands near six engineers per manager. Everything else on the chart is convention borrowed from a company that looked nothing … Read more
The top embedded systems recruiting firms for 2026 are KORE1, PRA USA, SPECTRAFORCE, Net2Source, Hunter Recruiting, EV.Careers, and TRIAD Engineering Corp. These firms were ranked using the Placement Authority Score, a 7-factor methodology weighted heavily toward recruiter reputation and embedded-specific industry depth. KORE1 ranks first for its combination of active engineering bench, W-2 staffing model, … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 An automation engineer job description has to name the control platform, say whether the work is new build or retrofit, publish the travel load, and state which safety standard governs the line. Leave those four out and the posting fits a test automation developer, a robot integrator, … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Yes, engineering managers should still code, but keep it under 40% of your week and off the critical path. Your team size sets the number, not a rule you read somewhere. He told me he was still shipping. That was the word he used, and he … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 When you inherit an engineering team you did not hire, diagnose the system before you judge the people. Most of what reads as individual underperformance is your predecessor’s operating model still running, and it will produce the same results with anyone sitting in those seats. The … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Team Topologies is an org-design model with four team types, stream-aligned, platform, enabling, and complicated-subsystem, plus three interaction modes. Most companies need two of them. You split a team when its cognitive load outgrows one complex domain, not when its headcount crosses a number. A CTO … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Four delivery metrics predict engineering velocity: change lead time, deployment frequency, change fail rate, and failed deployment recovery time. Story-point velocity and sprint completion rate predict almost nothing, because both are calculated from the estimate rather than from the delivery. I sat in a quarterly business … Read more
By Mike Carter, Director of Partnership Success, KORE1 An embedded software engineer costs $145,000 at the median in total compensation and $217,000 at the 75th percentile, and the role is not the same hire as a firmware engineer, whatever your req says. This person lives above the metal. They own the application layer on somebody … Read more
By Gregg Flecke, Senior Talent Acquisition Partner, KORE1 Embedded software engineer interview questions in 2026 test memory-constrained C, RTOS scheduling and priority inversion, interrupt and DMA discipline, hardware debug method, and secure update paths, not the data-structures loop a general software engineer runs. The two roles share a language and almost nothing else. Most reqs … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 An embedded software engineer job description has to name the silicon, the layer of the stack the person owns, where the hardware physically sits, and any safety standard the product is certified against. Base bands run $140,000 to $225,000 in 2026 depending on which of those four … Read more
