KORE1 ranks first among fractional CTO firms in 2026, earning an 8.66 on the Placement Authority Score through documented AI-augmented executive sourcing, a 4.7 Glassdoor rating 24% above the staffing industry average, and the only model on this list that places the fractional CTO and staffs the engineering team underneath them in a single engagement. … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Buy the vendor’s AI for the seventy percent every lender needs, document intake, underwriting signals, compliance logging, and build custom only at the one exception queue that is actually yours. Most engineering leaders pick one extreme or the other. The pattern that actually works sits in … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Fintech engineering teams keep velocity through an audit by making evidence a byproduct of the pipeline, tiering changes by risk instead of reviewing everything equally, and documenting a break-glass path before they need it. Three patterns. I have shipped under all three, auditors have signed off … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, Senior Partner and President at KORE1 VP of Finance salaries run $195,000 to $280,000 base in 2026 at most private companies, with PE-backed and pre-IPO seats reaching $300,000 and public-company divisional VPs clearing $340,000. The band is wide because the job is. Two people with the same title, the same team size, … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 A synchronous call inside an event-driven system costs you the product of every dependency’s availability, the worst tail latency anywhere in the chain, and the retry load of every client sitting above it. Three numbers. You can compute all three in an afternoon from data you … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 Controllers earn $115,000 to $185,000 base in 2026, with corporate controllers at audited, multi-entity companies reaching $175,000 to $235,000 and public-company controllers clearing $265,000. Those bands move on one thing more than any other, and it is not years of experience. It is what the monthly close … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 An estimate becomes an informed commitment when it names its assumptions, carries a range instead of one date, and comes with a standing right to renegotiate scope the moment an assumption breaks. An aspirational guess carries none of that. It carries a date and a hope. … Read more
KORE1 ranks #1 among executive search firms in 2026 with an 8.82/10 Placement Authority Score, scored across 7 independently verified criteria.
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Your best engineers cannot reliably evaluate an AI vendor demo, because the demo is a controlled performance and their own judgment about AI is measurably unreliable. In a 2025 randomized trial, experienced developers ran 19% slower with AI tools while believing they had run 20% faster. … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 Boomerang employees are workers who leave a company and later return, and by March 2025 they made up 35 percent of all new hires in ADP’s payroll data, the highest share since 2018. Most articles on the subject treat that as a feel-good story about loyalty. It … Read more
