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 A slow engineering org has a systems problem. A tired one has a capacity problem. Both produce the same flat delivery chart, and the treatments are opposite, which is why guessing costs you a quarter. The distinction is not how much the team ships. It is … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Mortgage tech API architecture survives volume spikes when four patterns hold: asynchronous intake, per-vendor bulkheads, a separated read path, and replayable writes with deliberate load shedding. Rate moves are not gradual. Volume arrives in days, not quarters, and the parts of your stack you do not … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 The hard lesson in mortgage tech is that compliance is not something your legal team bolts on after you ship. It lives in your database schema, your disclosure timers, and your deploy pipeline. The engineers who learn that early stop generating audit findings. The ones who … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 An engineering decision-rights framework is a one-page map that names who owns each kind of decision before it comes up, so calls get made at the right level instead of in a hallway or in your inbox. It is the third layer of the Clarity Stack, … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Before you sign an AI vendor contract, run the pilot through four gates. Proof, integration, exit, and kill. Each one is a go or no-go you clear before the signature, not after. Clear all four and the pilot has a real shot at production. Miss one … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 A point-to-point integration refactor replaces direct service-to-service calls with decoupled connections, usually async messaging or an event backbone, so one slow or changing system stops breaking every other system wired to it. Sequence it right and you get lower latency and, more to the point, a … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 A senior IC has to unlearn three skills to lead: producing the work yourself, being the person with the right answer, and getting your reward from a same-day merge. Every one of them built your reputation as an engineer. Every one of them will quietly cap … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 New engineering leaders get the same three decisions wrong in their first 90 days: they chase speed before the team agrees what “done” means, they become the human router for every priority, and they make themselves the approval gate for every decision. Each one feels like … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor at KORE1 Hiring a head of engineering starts with one call: whether you need a hands-on builder, a pure people-leader, or the first executive who owns all of engineering, then budget $200,000 to $450,000 and give the search two to four months. That single sentence hides the whole … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Engineering organizations grow afraid to refactor legacy code when years of small, reasonable changes pile up into load-bearing spaghetti, where every piece is quietly holding up another and nobody can predict what a fix will break. The fear is rational, not weak. It is an information … Read more
