Top 10 Highest IT Salaries Based On Tech Skills In 2021: Dice

From RabbitMQ and MapReduce to AI and Cloudera, here are the top 10 IT skills that capture the highest salaries, according to Dice’s new tech salary report.

Top Tech Skills That Pay The Highest Salaries

Businesses across the nation are realizing the growing importance of collecting and analyzing vast amounts of data to create effective long-term strategies as well as new sales opportunities.

Last year, the need for quick and accurate data analysts became critical to many organizations, leading to big data technologists earning a premium salary, according to the 2021 Dice Tech Salary Report. Some of the largest companies in the world—from Amazon and Twitter to JPMorgan Chase and Capital One—are actively seeking IT professionals with specific skill sets.

“Companies are pouring greater resources into artificial intelligence and machine learning initiatives that leverage massive amounts of data to produce ‘smart’ apps and services,” said Dice in its 2021 salary report based on a survey of over 9,000 employed technologists across the country.

CRN breaks down the top 10 highest-paying IT skills by salary in the U.S, according to Dice’s new salary report.

No. 10: Elasticsearch

Average Salary: $129,480

Cracking into the top 10 in terms of highest average salaries by skill is Elasticsearch. The average annual salary for an IT professional who is skilled in Elasticsearch is $129,480, according to Dice.

Elasticsearch allows organizations to store, search and analyze huge volumes of data quickly and in near-real-time and receive answers in milliseconds. This skill set is in such high demand because it’s a distributed, free and open search and analytics engine for all types of data including textual, geospatial, structured and unstructured. Professionals skilled on Elasticsearch have capabilities around security analytics, website search, application performance monitoring, logging and log analytics, infrastructure metrics and container monitoring.

No. 9: Apache Cassandra

Average Salary: $130,491

Another top big data skill set that generates a hefty salary is Apache Cassandra. Technologists who have this IT skill capture an average salary of $130,491, Dice said.

Apache Cassandra is an open-source distributed NoSQL database management system designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers, providing high availability with no single point of failure. Cassandra can handle petabytes of data and thousands of concurrent operations per second to enable organizations to manage large amounts of data across multi-cloud environments.

No. 8: Natural Language Processing

Average Salary: $131,542

Natural language processing allows software to understand the nuances of human speech and is vital to many emerging AI applications. In 2020, the average IT salary for natural language processing rose nearly 5 percent year over year to $131,542.

The top organizations seeking IT professions with this skill include Amazon, Deloitte, IBM, Wells Fargo and Verizon, according to Dice. Several notable occupations that request natural language processing skills include data scientists, defense intelligence analysts and senior product managers.

No. 7: Artificial Intelligence

Average Salary: $131,907

One of the fastest-growing salaries by skill in the U.S. is artificial intelligence. IT professionals skilled in AI generate an average salary of $131,907, representing a salary increase of more than 7 percent year over year.

From chatbots that anticipate customer questions to cybersecurity tools more capable of recognizing threats, AI is the future for many organizations. Some of the largest organizations hiring AI specialists include Apple, Amazon, Booz Allen Hamilton, Facebook and Microsoft.

No. 6: Cloudera

Average Salary: $132,045

Cloudera delivers an enterprise data cloud platform for any data anywhere. The average salary for an IT professional with a Cloudera skill set is $132,045.

Cloudera provides a software platform for data engineering, data warehousing, machine learning and analytics that runs in the cloud or on-premises. Powered by open-source innovation, the company seeks to advance digital transformation for the world’s largest enterprises. Cloudera is led by President and CEO Robert Bearden, who previously co-founded and led Hortonworks.

No. 5: PaaS

Average Salary: $132,314

Companies are increasingly turning toward the cloud as the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated remote work initiatives for companies across the globe. Cloud-based tools and platforms that enjoy high salaries include Platform as a Service. PaaS skills are used by cloud architects and engineers to build out highly customized deployments for organizations.

In 2020, the average IT salary for a PaaS professional rose 1.3 percent year over year to $132,314, according to Dice. The top organizations seeking PaaS specialists are Oracle, PwC, Microsoft, Aconex and Salesforce.

No. 4: Service-Oriented Architecture

Average Salary: $133,119

A service-oriented architecture makes software components reusable via service interfaces. Technologists utilize service-oriented architecture’s common communication standards to rapidly incorporate new applications without having to perform deep integration each time.

The average salary for an IT professional with service-oriented architecture skills is $133,119, up 1.2 percent year over year, according to Dice. Key vendors leading the service-oriented architecture market include IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Software AG.

No. 3: Mockito

Average Salary: $133,261

Mockito is a popular mock framework that allows organizations to create and configure mock objects. The average salary for an IT professional with a Mockito skill set is $133,261, representing a salary increase of 1.1 percent compared with 2019.

Mockito allows developers to verify the behavior of a system under test without establishing prior expectations. The framework enables the creation of substitutes of real objects for testing purposes. Mockito lets technologists write tests with a simple API that can produce verification errors.

No. 2: MapReduce

Average Salary: $135,516

Technologists with MapReduce skills saw their annual average salary increase 2.1 percent in 2020 to $135,516. MapReduce is a programming model vital for big data processing and analytics as well as generating big data sets.

The top organizations currently hiring IT professionals with MapReduce skills are JPMorgan Chase, Capital One, Twitter, Accenture and Google. Technologists who are skilled in MapReduce capture jobs such as big data architects, data scientists, Hadoop developers, data engineers and ETL developers.

No. 1: RabbitMQ

Average Salary: $136,151

Not only does RabbitMQ rank No. 1 on Dice’s 2021 top salaries by skills report, but it is also the fastest-growing skill by salary. The average salary for an IT professional with RabbitMQ skills climbed 10.1 percent in 2020 to $136,151.

RabbitMQ is an open-source messaging broker—an intermediary for messaging—that is growing quickly in popularity. RabbitMQ software gives applications a common platform to send and receive messages, as well as a safe place to store messages. The open-source message broker runs on many operating systems and cloud environments, providing a wide range of developer tools.