IT has at all times been often called a profitable business for job seekers, with tech professionals incomes a median annual wage of $112,521, in response to knowledge from the 2025 Cube Tech Wage Report. Tech salaries elevated by 2.2% in 2024 and people working within the business earn 5.7% greater than friends in others.

Previously 12 months, a number of particular abilities have taken maintain, particularly with the rise of AI in enterprise. These working with AI options, whether or not designing growing, or implementing AI instruments, earn salaries which can be practically 18% larger than their friends not working with AI know-how, in response to Cube. Expertise in AI, cloud computing, cybersecurity, programming languages, SaaS, and DevOps can earn a premium wage. So listed below are the ten highest-paying IT skills Cube says may help you earn a better revenue and land a job in a aggressive market.

Service-oriented structure (SOA)

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural framework used for software program improvement that focuses on purposes and programs as unbiased companies. Every service is damaged down after which categorized by its personal particular set of capabilities right into a standardized interface, enabling these companies to work together with and entry each other. This makes it simpler to keep up, replace, and monitor companies with out breaking different components of the system, or introduce any pointless downtime. Having emerged within the late Nineties, SOA is a precursor to microservices however stays a talent that may assist guarantee software program programs stay versatile, scalable, and reusable throughout the group.

Common wage: $152,026

Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine constructed on Apache Lucene that allows customers to retailer, search, and analyze massive knowledge units in real-time. It’s turn out to be a preferred instrument for organizations with massive quantities of knowledge to sift by way of, permitting customers to shortly search by way of complicated knowledge units saved throughout totally different servers. Elasticsearch is valued as a extremely scalable and distributed instrument that gives real-time search and analytics, full-text search, geospatial search, and structured search.

Common wage: $139,549

Ruby

Ruby is an open-source, object-oriented programming language designed to be easy, readable, and simple to write down. Developed within the mid-Nineties, Ruby has a status for being designed as a productive and enjoyable programming language, with the aim to emphasise human wants in design, fairly than pc wants. It’s primarily used for internet improvement, together with the Ruby on Rails framework, in addition to for scripting, automation, DevOps, and knowledge processing.

Common wage: $136,920

Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is a robust instrument for real-time knowledge processing and analyzing, utilizing a distributed streaming platform design. Kafka additionally makes it doable for organizations to deal with massive knowledge units, with excessive throughput and low latency, and gives a scalable and fault-tolerant infrastructure for knowledge streaming. And with Kafka, it’s doable for a number of totally different programs to alternate knowledge in real-time. It’s a preferred instrument in finance, telecommunications, and e-commerce, amongst different industries, and is usually used together with different instruments together with Apache Spark, Apache Flink, and Apache Storm.

Common wage: $136,526

Redis

Redis is an open-source knowledge storage and administration instrument designed to be quick, environment friendly, and highly effective. It allows customers to cache and retailer knowledge, making it fast and simple to entry, whereas additionally retaining it backed as much as a tough drive. As an IT instrument, it’s recognized for being useful to handle knowledge constructions, deal with knowledge in a distributed surroundings, and supply a high-performance and scalable answer for knowledge storage and caching.

Common wage: $136,357

JDBC

Java Database Connectivity abilities are essential for connecting Java purposes to databases and making certain they are often accessed with SQL queries. It’s a talent most typical for java builders, backend engineers, full-stack builders, and database directors. It’s additionally most frequently used to ascertain database connectivity, transaction administration, connection pooling, exception and metadata dealing with, consequence processing, and executing SQL queries.

Common wage: $135,486

Containers

Containerization is the method of packaging purposes and any related applied sciences right into a single unit referred to as a container, and making certain it acts predictably throughout totally different environments. Understanding how containers work is a basic talent for anybody working in software program improvement, DevOps, cloud computing, and IT operations. Containers assist make sure that organizations construct dependable, scalable, and constant purposes that can work for end-users on quite a lot of platforms and programs.

Common wage: $135,358

Go

Go, additionally known as Golang, is an open-source programming language developed in 2007 by Google as a user-friendly programming language to help within the improvement of high-level software program programs, internet purposes, and cloud and networking companies. It’s designed to be environment friendly and simple to make use of, with easy syntax and options together with rubbish assortment, reminiscence security, and concurrency help. It’s turn out to be more and more standard for cloud-based programming because of it being adept at dealing with parallelism and concurrency. But it surely’s additionally utilized in distributed programs, internet improvement, ML, and community programming.

Common wage: $134,727

Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift is a cloud knowledge warehouse service designed to be quick, scalable, and totally managed for companies seeking to analyze massive knowledge units. It’s a talent widespread for knowledge engineers, knowledge analysts, BI builders, software program engineers, and cloud architects. Amazon Redshift helps organizations with managing massive knowledge units, SQL and question optimization, integrating AWS companies, implementing safety and entry measures, and designing knowledge modeling and warehousing ideas.

Common wage: $143,103

REST

Representational State Switch is a software program structure type used to design internet companies, networked purposes, and APIs. It’s recognized for being easy, scalable, and versatile, permitting backend builders, full-stack builders, cloud engineers, cell app builders, and DevOps and API engineers to oversell RESTful APIs. It’s principally used for designing and growing API backend improvement, cloud computing, microservices, and internet purposes.

Common wage: $133,970