By Mike Carter, Director of Partnership Success, KORE1 Tech salary benchmarking is the practice of pricing a role against several live market sources at once, adjusted for level, location, and stack, instead of trusting one published average that started aging the day it went out. A number is not a benchmark. A method is. What … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 A promoted IC usually needs two to three quarters to find real footing as an engineering manager, and closer to a year before the team feels it. Washing out runs on a faster clock. You can lose a team in a single quarter, and that asymmetry … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 Hiring a principal product manager in 2026 means budgeting $210,000 to $300,000 base, or $350,000 to $700,000 total at large tech firms, and understanding you are buying a top-of-the-ladder individual contributor, not a manager. That last part is where most of these hires go sideways. A principal … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 An engineering manager becomes the bottleneck when nothing ships without their review, their approval, or their opinion. The fix is not learning to move faster through the queue. It is moving decisions out of your head and into a system your team can run without you. … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 To hire a Chief AI Officer, decide first whether the seat is a strategist, an operator, or a governance owner, budget $400,000 to $800,000 in total compensation, and plan three to five months for a genuine executive search. That range covers most of the market. It hides the thing … Read more
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
