By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 To hire a director of IT, first decide whether you need an operator or a strategist, set a base band of roughly $150,000 to $230,000, and run a four-to-eight-week search built around business outcomes rather than a tool checklist. That base moves a lot depending on whether the person … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor at KORE1 A COO earns $175,000 to $400,000 in base salary in 2026 at most private and mid-market companies, with total compensation of $250,000 to $700,000 once bonus and equity land, and far more at public companies. The base is the easy part. What sits on top of … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Replacing a tangle of point-to-point integrations with a Kafka pub/sub backbone cut our downstream processing latency by 45 percent, removed the bottlenecks that made every change risky, and let the platform absorb peak transaction volume without falling over. This is the actual migration, the parts that … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 Hiring a VP of Data in 2026 means budgeting roughly $200,000 to $300,000 in base salary plus equity, and deciding first whether you are consolidating several scattered data teams under one executive or just renaming a manager. Most of these searches run eight to fourteen weeks. The … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Engineering priorities have to live in writing because a decision made in a hallway reaches maybe four people, changes without a trace, and leaves every engineer who missed it building toward a target that quietly moved. That is the hallway-decision problem, and it is the second … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, Senior Partner and President at KORE1 A CFO earns $250,000 to $450,000 in base salary in 2026 at most private and mid-market companies, with total compensation of $400,000 to $900,000 once bonus and equity stack, and far higher at public companies. The base reads simple enough. The total does not. Two CFOs … Read more
By Mike Carter To hire a CISO in 2026, decide what the seat actually owns before you open the search, budget $250,000 to $700,000 in total compensation, and plan eight to twelve weeks for a real executive search. The role carries personal legal exposure now, so the offer has to account for that, and the … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, Senior Partner and President, KORE1 To hire a VP of Product in 2026, scope the seat against your stage, budget $215,000 to $285,000 in base salary plus equity, run a judgment-based interview loop, and check references hard. Most product-leadership searches take eight to fourteen weeks once the role is scoped right. The … Read more
Pricing the rest of the product ladder? The rung below this seat is in our group product manager salary guide, and the seat above it is the VP product salary guide for 2026. This page is about the director number, and why the hiring manager and finance keep walking in with two of them. Director … Read more
A data team is structured around four jobs done in order: move the data, model it, analyze it, and govern it, with a single leader owning all four. Most orgs start with one data engineer and add specialists only as the work earns them. That sentence took me fifteen years on a recruiting desk to … Read more
