By Mike Carter, Director of Partnership Success, KORE1 Retained search buys one firm’s exclusive, staged-fee commitment to a single executive seat, while contingency pays only on placement and spreads your role across a recruiter’s caseload. Confidential and genuinely scarce leadership hires belong on retainer. A well-defined director role in a healthy market usually does not. … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 A director of data engineering runs your data platform through other managers, and in 2026 that seat costs $215,000 to $310,000 in base salary depending on how many teams sit under it. The band is wide because the job is. Some of these directors own one warehouse … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 Hiring a director of product management in 2026 means budgeting $200,000 to $285,000 base, $300,000 to $600,000 total at tech-competitive employers, and deciding first whether you are buying an outcome owner or an org builder. Those are two different people. The pay lands in the same place. … Read more
By Mike Carter, Director of Partnership Success, KORE1 Hiring a chief product officer in 2026 starts with two honest questions: is product truly a company-level function here, and will the CEO actually hand over the roadmap? Get those right, put a base of $260,000 to $450,000 on the table alongside real equity, and give the … 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
The U.S. air traffic controller shortage means the FAA is staffed roughly 3,000 controllers below its own targets, with more than a third of its facilities sitting under the 85 percent staffing goal. It is the most expensive live demonstration in the country of a simple hiring truth. You cannot freeze a talent pipeline and … 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 Tom Kenaley, Senior Partner and President, KORE1 Hiring an accounting manager in 2026 typically costs $75,000 to $160,000 depending on team size and audit exposure, with most searches wrapping in four to eight weeks. The dollar figure is rarely what trips companies up. Deciding whether the seat is genuinely a management job, and not … Read more
By Mike Carter, Director of Partnership Success, KORE1 The product manager career path climbs seven rungs, from associate PM near $95,000 to chief product officer past $350,000, then forks after senior into a hands-on lead track and a management track that ends in the C-suite. Most people only ever study the rung right above their … Read more
