Top 10 Highest-Paid IT Skills In 2023: Redis, Chef, Golang

Here are the 10 highest-paying IT skills—from Chef and Redis to containers and Kubernetes—reaping the highest annual salaries in 2023, according to the new Dice Tech Salary Report.

Tech professionals with IT skills around Redis, Chef, Go, Kubernetes and containers are generating some of the highest technology salaries in America.

Businesses are paying employees with these in-demand IT skill sets an average annual salary of over $140,000 in today’s market, according to a new report by Dice.

“Corporate and government strategies hinge increasingly on data analytics, particularly massive data sets, which is driving salary growth in those areas,” said Dice in its new 2023 Dice Tech Salary Report unveiled on Tuesday.

[Related: 10 Most In-Demand IT Skills For Freelance Jobs In 2023]

“Organizations should prepare to pay quite a bit for tech professionals who have mastered some key data, cloud and virtualization abilities, including MapReduce, Elasticsearch, Apache Kafka and Teradata, all of which dominate this year’s list of most lucrative skills,” Dice said.

Top Paying Tech Skills In 2023

Dice is a database for technology professionals, managing over 9 million profiles in the United States. The platform helps tech employees manage their careers and employers connect with highly skilled IT talent. For Dice’s new 2023 tech jobs and salary report, the company surveyed more than 7,000 respondents who are currently employed inside the US.

Overall, the average tech salary continues to increase with an average salary of $111,348 in 2022, up 2.3 percent compared to 2021.

Some of the highest tech salaries today originate from data-related IT skills such as Elasticsearch, Apache Kafka, Teradata and Redis—all of which pull a salary of over $140,000.

These in-demand tech employees are worth the salary considering how important areas like data management and security have become to the success of most organizations.

“Many tech professionals have mastered a ‘toolkit’ of these languages and skills, putting them in a position to craft the cloud infrastructure and applications that organizations everywhere need to maintain, grow and rapidly adjust to new circumstances,” said Dice.

Here are the top 10 paying IT skillsets in 2023 that companies are clamoring for.

No. 10: Containers

Average Salary: $138,550

Cracking into Dice’s top 10 IT skills that generates the highest salary is containers.

IT professionals who have tech skills around containers generate an average salary of $138,550. This representing an average salary increase of 9.5 percent for containers skills compared to 2021, according to Dice.

A container can be used to run a small microservice or software process to a large and mission-critical applications. Skills needed to manage containers include knowledge about cybersecurity tools, orchestration and schedulers, storage and virtual network management and monitoring.

No. 9: Kubernetes

Average Salary: $139,167

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

With this in-demand technology, it’s no wonder why a Kubernetes professional generated an average salary of $139,167 per year. There was no Dice data on Kubernetes year-over-year annual salary increase.

Needed IT skills for Kubernetes include knowledge on designing self-service applications, constant support of users, and autoscaling infrastructure based on workloads. Kubernetes professionals also need to help organizations with DevOps.

No. 8: PaaS (Platform as a Service)

Average Salary: $139,858

With cloud computing growing faster than traditional IT year after year, there’s no wonder employers are paying a premium for Platform as a Service (PaaS) skills.

The average salary for PaaS professionals in the US is $139,858. This represents a salary increase of 3.2 percent year over year compared to 2021.

Some of the most popular PaaS skills revolve around tools from cloud market share leaders Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

No. 7: Redis

Average Salary: $140,290

As the need for businesses to better manage and leverage their vast amounts of data grows, organizations are paying top dollar for Redis data experts.

IT professionals who have skills with Redis generate an average salary of $140,290. This represents an annual Redis salary increase of 1.6 percent compared to the previous year.

Redis is a popular open source, in-memory data store used as a database. Redis professionals have skills analyzing real-time data and data processing, as well as helping businesses with ad targeting, personalization and social media analytics.

No. 6: Teradata

Average Salary: $141,515

Teradata is one of the most popular Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) solutions in the market today.

An IT professional skilled on Teradata generates an average salary of $141,515. This represents an increase of 14.7 percent compared to 2021, one of the biggest annual salary percentage increases on Dice’s list.

Teradata is capable of handling massive volumes of data and is highly scalable. Teradata professionals are typically software engineering experts responsible for maintaining a company’s database functions.

No. 5: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Average Salary: $142,459

Making it into Dice’s top five highest paid IT skills in 2023 is service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Skills SOA professionals generate an annual salary of $142,459, representing an increase of 1.6 percent year over year.

SOA is a method of software development that uses software components to create business applications. Each service offers a business capability, while services can communicate and interoperate with each other across platforms and languages—a much needed technology for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

No. 4: Apache Kafka

Average Salary: $142,764

Apache Kafka has been a staple in the IT industry for years as an open-source distributed event streaming platform used by thousands of companies for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics and data integration.

With a solid 8.4 percent year over year salary growth rate in 2022, the average Apache Kafka professional is able to generate an average salary of $142,764.

Kafka professionals build and maintain message configuration and flows, provide issue analysis on Kafka applications, develop software on written requirements, run unit tests as well as solve issues with Kafka software.

No. 3: Chef

Average Salary: $143,188

Coming in at number three on Dice’s top paid IT skills is Chef, an open-source systems management and cloud infrastructure automation platform.

The average salary for professionals with IT skills for Chef is $143,188. This represents an annual salary growth of 8.8 percent compared to the previous year, according to data from Dice.

Top skills Chef professionals provide for a company include managing a variety of node types, such as servers, cloud virtual machines, network devices and containers. Employers pay top dollar for Chef skills because it’s one of the world’s most popular solutions for DevOps professionals.

No. 2: Elasticsearch

Average Salary: $143,619

Elasticsearch dubs itself as the world’s leading free and open search and analytics solution.

The average salary for a skilled Elasticsearch professional is $143,619. This represents a year-over-year salary increase of 4.5 percent compared to 2021.

Professionals make such a high salary for being skilled on Elasticsearch because they provide expertise on data search, observability and security solutions to help businesses get full visibility of their infrastructure and applications. Skilled Elasticsearch professionals have knowledge on a company’s business analytics, security intelligence, networking, log analytics, full-text search and storage management.

No. 1: Go/Golang

Average Salary: $145,672

The IT skills employers are paying the most for in today’s market is for Go, also known as Golang, professionals. Go is an open source, high-level programming language initially designed at Google used for everything from cloud-native development and distrusted network services to scalable database implementations and supporting DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE).

Employers are paying more for Go skills than ever before as seen by its massive 18.2 percent salary jump, the biggest increase on Dice’s top 10 list.

The average Go, or Golang, professional generates a salary of $145,672, up 18.2 percent year over year.

(However: MapReduce professional might make more. See next slide)

MapReduce

Average Salary: $146,672

According to Dice’s list, professionals skilled on MapReduce generate the highest salary out of every tech skill tracked. However, Dice said the sample size for MapReduce respondents in its report was less than 100. Therefore, MapReduce was statistically not valid.

Although MapReduce couldn’t officially make Dice’s list due to its employee sample size, it is still worth noting that MapReduce professionals reported making an average salary of $145,672. This represents an annual salary growth rate of 9.3 percent year over year.

MapReduce is a programming model or pattern that enables massive scalability across hundreds or thousands of servers in a Hadoop cluster. It is a core component to the functioning of a Hadoop framework.