The 20 Highest-Paying IT Skills By Salary: 2024 Dice Report

Here are the 20 highest-paying skill sets in the U.S. by average salary, including Kubernetes, SAP HANA, Docker, Elasticsearch, SOA and PostgreSQL.

Mark Haranas
clock • 8 min read

No. 10: Apache Kafka  

Average Salary: $132,103 

Making it into the top ten on Dice's list is the popular distributed data store and stream-processing platform Apache Kafka, developed by the Apache Software Foundation. The open source system is optimized for ingesting and processing streaming data in real-time.  

Professionals who own an Apache Kafka skill set capture an annual salary of $132,103. This salary is down 7.5 percent compared to 2022.  

No. 9: RDBMS 

Average Salary: $132,184 

The software used to store, query, manage and retrieve data stored inside a relational databased is called RDBMS, which refers to a relational database management system. The RDBMS provides an interface between people and the applications and database, along with administrative functions for managing data access and storage.  

IT experts who are skilled in RDBMS generate $132,184 for an average salary. This is down 3.6 percent year on year.  

No. 8: Kubernetes  

Average Salary: $132,985 

Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating the development, scaling and the overall management of containerized applications.  

Professionals who own a Kubernetes skill set generate an average salary of $132,985. This is down 4.4 percent year on year. 

No. 7: KornShell  

Average Salary: $132,995 

At No. 7, KornShell is an interactive command interpreter and command programming language for Unix. KornShell enables IT teams to perform a command substitution. 

IT experts who are skilled in KornShell capture a average salary of $132,995 per year. This salary is up 2 percent compared to 2022. 

No. 6: REST 

Average Salary: $134,026 

REST stands for Representational State Transfer. It is a software architecture that imposes conditions on how an API should operate. REST provides standards between systems in order to make it easier for system to communicate and interoperate with each other.  

Professionals who own a REST skill set generate an average salary of $134,026. This salary is down 1 percent compared to 2022. 

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Mark Haranas
Author spotlight

Mark Haranas

Mark Haranas is an assistant news editor and longtime journalist now covering cloud, multicloud, software, SaaS and channel partners at CRN.