Top 12 In-Demand IT Skills With Salaries Over $130K: Dice

From Amazon’s RDS and DynamoDB to Elasticsearch and SOA, here are the top 12 IT skills that generate the highest average salaries, according to a new 2022 report by Dice.

The IT Skills With The Highest Tech Salaries

If you’re looking for a high-paying IT job, there are 12 specialized IT skills you should be seeking which generate an average salary of over $130,000.

In 2022, there are several IT skillsets that are high-paying due to the highly specialized skillset needed to be mastered, compared to the millions who learn certain programming languages, according to the new Dice Tech Salary Report for 2022.

“What this list of the top-paying skills makes absolutely clear is that organizations are more than happy to pay a premium for skills related to enterprise-level infrastructure, particularly as it relates to data storage and discovery, and the cloud,” said Dice in its new report which surveyed over 7,200 IT professionals working in the U.S.

Although programming skills such as Ruby, JavaScript and Python are equally vital to many businesses, those skills aren’t paying quite as high as salaries as these 12 IT skills.

In the emerging as-a-service and multi-cloud world, CRN breaks down the 12 top paying salaries based on specific IT skills, according to Dice’s new 2022 salary report.

12. Apache Kafka

Average Salary: $131,520

Salary Increase: 2.1%

Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform used by thousands of companies for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications.

The average salary in 2021 for an IT professional who was skilled in Apache Kafka was $131,520, an increase of 2.1 percent year over year.

Apache Kafka is a distributed data store optimized for ingesting and processing streaming data in real-time. The open-source software platform was developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala and Java.

Apache Kafka is primarily used to build real-time streaming data pipelines and applications that adapt to the data streams. Apache Kafka combines messaging, storage, and stream processing to allow storage and analysis of both historical and real-time data.

11. MapReduce

Average Salary: $132,104

Salary Increase: -2.6%

MapReduce is a programming paradigm that enables massive scalability across hundreds or thousands of servers in a Hadoop cluster. As the processing component, MapReduce is the heart of Apache Hadoop.

The average salary for a technologist who owns a MapReduce skillset in the U.S. was $132,104 in 2021, which is actually down 2.6 percent year over year.

Initially used by Google for analyzing its massive search results, MapReduce gained popularity due to its ability to split and process terabytes of data in parallel, achieving quicker results. It aggregates all the data from multiple servers to return a consolidated output back to the application.

MapReduce programming offers benefits to customers to gain insights from big data including flexibility, scalability and speed.

10. SAP HANA

Average Salary: $133,302

Salary Increase: 6.7%

HANA is SAP’s high-performance in-memory database that provides advanced analytics on multi-model data both on-premises and in the cloud.

The average salary for an IT professional skilled on HANA in 2021 was $133,302, representing an increase of 6.7 percent year over year.

The SAP HANA database is for transactional and analytical workloads with any data type — on a single data copy. It breaks down the transactional and analytical silos in organizations in order for quick decision-making, in part, due to its ability to integrate data from multiple areas within an organization such as mobile information, traditional business documents and IoT data from sensors.

HANA, which stands for High Performance Analytic Appliance, serves as a platform for enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and other critical business applications.

9. AWS DynamoDB

Average Salary: $133,522

Salary Increase: 5.6%

Amazon Web Services’ DynamoDB is a serverless, key-value NoSQL database designed to run high-performance applications at any scale.

The average salary for an IT professional skilled on AWS’ DynamoDB in 2021 is $133,522, representing an salary increase of 5.6 percent year over year.

DynamoDB offers built-in security, continuous backups, automated multi-region replication, in-memory caching and data export tools. Some of the biggest use cases for AWS’ DynamoDB is developing software applications, delivering seamless retail experiences, creating media metadata stores and scaling gaming platforms.

The AWS database system supports data structures and key-valued cloud services as it relates to AWS. It allows users the benefit of auto-scaling, in-memory caching, backup and restore options for all their internet-scale applications using DynamoDB.

8. AWS RDS

Average Salary: $133,651

Salary Increase: 10.9%

Another top AWS skillset that businesses are willing to pay top dollar for is Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS). The average U.S. salary for a person skilled on RDS is $133,651, up nearly 11 percent year over year, showing how valuable learning AWS tools are in today’s market.

Amazon RDS aims to make it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks, such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups.

Amazon RDS is available on several database instance types, optimized for memory, performance or I/O, and provides you with familiar database engines to choose from including Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database and SQL Server.

7. PaaS

Average Salary: $134,894

Salary Increase: 1.9%

Platform as a services (PaaS) is a cloud computing model where a third-party provider delivers the hardware and software tools to users over the internet. The PaaS provider hosts the hardware—such as servers and storage—and software on its own infrastructure, providing resources like cloud-based applications.

An IT professional with a PaaS skillset generated an average salary of $134,894 in 2021, up 1.9 percent year over year.

PaaS provides a framework that developers can build upon to develop or customize cloud-based applications. Employees skilled on PaaS can help companies avoid the expense and complexity of buying and managing software licenses, the underlying application infrastructure, container orchestrators such as Kubernetes, development tools and other resources.

6. Redis

Average Salary: $136,405

Salary Increase: 5.5%

Redis is an open source -memory data structure store that is used as a database, cache, and message broker. Some of the biggest use cases for Redis is around real-time analytics such as social media analytics, ad targeting and IoT.

The average salary for technologists skilled on Redis was $136,405 in 2021, representing a salary increase of 5.5 percent year over year.

Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, geospatial indexes and streams. Redis has built-in replication, Lua scripting, LRU eviction, transactions, and different levels of on-disk persistence, and provides high availability via Redis Sentinel and automatic partitioning with Redis Cluster.

Redis can also be used with streaming solutions such as Apache Kafka and Amazon Kinesis as an in-memory data store to ingest, process, and analyze real-time data with sub-millisecond latency.

5. Elasticsearch

Average Salary: $137,203

Salary Increase: 6%

Elasticsearch is a highly scalable open-source full-text search and analytics engine that allows organizations to store, search, and analyze big volumes of data quickly and in near real time.

The average IT expert skilled on Elasticsearch generated an average salary of $137,203 in 2021, representing a salary increase of 6 percent year over year.

Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of addressing a growing number of use cases. It is generally used as the underlying technology that powers applications that have complex search features and requirements. As the heart of the Elastic Stack, it centrally stores data for fast search, fine‑tuned relevancy, and powerful analytics that scale with ease.

4. RabbitMQ

Average Salary: $137,717

Salary Increase: 1.2%

RabbitMQ dubs itself as the most widely deployed open-source message broker in the world. RabbitMQ is lightweight and easy to deploy on premises and in the cloud. It supports multiple messaging protocols.

The average IT expert skilled on RabbitMQ earned an average salary of $137,717 in 2021, up 1.2 percent year over year.

RabbitMQ can be deployed in distributed and federated configurations to meet high-scale, high-availability requirements. It runs on a slew of operating systems and cloud environments, while providing a wide range of develop tools for most popular languages.

Some popular features on RabbitMQ include asynchronous messaging, cross-language messaging with programming launches such as Java, Python and Ruby, distributed deployments, as well as offering an array of tools and plugins supporting continuous integration to other enterprise systems.

3. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Average Salary: $139,961

Salary Increase: 5.1%

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a software development model that enables services to communicate across different platforms and languages to build applications. SOA defines a way to make software components reusable and interoperable via service interfaces.

The average salary for a person skilled on SOA in 2021 was $139,961, which represents a salary increase of 5.1 percent year over year.

SOA helps organizations by enabling massive interoperability between applications and services. SOA use common interface standards and an architectural pattern so they can be rapidly integrating into new applications, helping remove tasks for developers. A service oriented architecture allow various services to communicate using a coupling system to either pass data or coordinate an activity.

2. Mockito

Average Salary: $140,366

Salary Increase: 5.3%

Mockito is a popular open-source framework for mocking objects in software testing. Mockito’s mocking framework is a JAVA-based library used for effective unit testing of JAVA applications with the goal of simplifying test setup.

The average salary for an IT professional skilled on Mockito was $140,366 in 2021, representing a salary increase of 5.3 percent year over year. It is key to note that Dice said it received less than 100 respondents regarding salaries based off of Mockito.

Mockito is a Java-based library used to create simple and basic test APIs for performing unit testing of Java applications. It can also be used with other frameworks such as JUnit and TestNG.

1. Solr

Average Salary: $143,464

Salary Increase: 15.8%

Solr is an open-source enterprise search platform built on Apache Lucene. Solr is widely used for enterprise search and analytics use cases and has an active development community and regular releases. Solr runs as a standalone full-text search server.

The average tech salary for a person skilled on Solr in 2021 was $143,464, representing a whopping 15.8 percent increase in pay year over year. It is key to note that Dice said it received less than 100 respondents regarding salaries based off Solr.

Providing distributed search and index replication, Solr is designed for scalability and fault tolerance. Solr powers the search and navigation features of many of the world’s largest internet sites.