10 highest-paying IT skills for 2024

IT has always been known as a lucrative industry for job seekers, but in the past year, with increased layoffs, some of that confidence has wavered. According to a report from Indeed, a large part of this shift has come as organizations focus more on adopting AI in the workplace. As a result, AI skills are now among the most sought-after skills, even as companies retrench via layoffs.

Even as the IT job market experiences shifting dynamics, employment website Indeed reports a range of roles have maintained resiliency and even grown in demand. These roles include data scientist, machine learning engineer, software engineer, research scientist, full-stack developer, deep learning engineer, software architect, and field programmable gate array (FPGA) engineer. A quick scan of these roles tells you all you need to know about what companies are looking for: hard-to-acquire skills around AI, machine learning, and software development.

Here are the 10 highest-paying IT skills that can help you earn a higher salary and land a job in a competitive market, according to data from Indeed.

Generative AI

Generative AI is a hot topic in the tech industry, and not surprisingly, businesses are eagerly adopting the technology to create services and products that make the most of this emerging technology. Chat applications such as ChatGPT have made strong headway, as have image-generators such as DALL-E 3, capturing the imagination of businesses everywhere. Such technologies are being harnessed to create better customer service platforms, automate processes, and even drive business decision-making. The scope of generative AI is huge and we’re only in the early stages of its adoption, so acquiring these skills will make your resume stand out for years to come.

Average salary: $174,727

SoC

System-on-chip (SoC) skills involve integrated circuit technology with the aim of better compressing data and system components into one piece of silicon. It’s become a vital skill for producing mobile devices and for developing embedded systems, IoT devices, and other consumer products. SoC helps reduce power consumption, and can help ensure devices require less space and cost less to build from discrete components, making it an appealing choice for businesses developing technical hardware.

Average salary: $174,564

Deep learning

Deep learning has quickly become a hot skill in the tech industry as companies seek to make the most of AI. Deep learning is a subset of machine learning and revolves around creating artificial neural networks that can intelligently pull together and learn information from several data sources. It’s a critical component to AI, enabling the services and products built on AI to be more intelligent and efficient for users and businesses.

Average salary: $170,939

Torch

Torch is a scientific computing framework, scripting language, and open-source machine learning library based on the Lua programming language — and it’s often used to build and train deep neural networks. Torch enables fast and efficient GPU support, focusing on improving flexibility and speed when building complex algorithms. It can be useful for an array of AI-related tasks, including deep learning research, computer vision, natural language processing (NLP), model development, and model deployment.

Average salary: $169,874

PyTorch

PyTorch is an open-source machine learning library developed by Facebook’s AI Research Lab (FAIR). It is used to execute and improve machine learning tasks such as NLP, computer vision, and deep learning. PyTorch is a critical framework for building neural networks and is based on the Python programming language and the Torch open-source library. It’s a successor to the Torch framework, and is useful for deep learning research, model development and deployment, enabling computer vision, and implementing NLP.

Average salary: $168,636

Computer vision

Computer vision is an area of AI focused on enabling computers to see the world as humans do, and to derive meaningful insights from visual inputs and digital images. The goal is to enable AI to intelligently process visual information, make decisions based on what it sees, offer recommendations, and even take action to remedy problems as they arise. Computer vision skills are important for helping AI systems with image classification, object detection and recognition, 3D reconstructions, biometric data collection, and motion tracking and analysis.

Average salary: $166,873

SystemVerilog

Commonly used in the semiconductor industry, SystemVerilog is a hardware description and verification language used to model, design, test, simulate, and implement electronic systems. SystemVerilog skills are especially useful for digital design and verification, implementing advanced verification methodologies, high-level synthesis, FPGA design, ASIC design, and assertion-based verifications. These skills are most sought after in the semiconductor, telecommunications, aerospace, and consumer electronic industries.

Average salary: $165,832

Mesos

Mesos is an open-source project that started as a research project at UC Berkeley, later evolving into an open-source Apache project. Apache Mesos is an open-source distributed systems kernel that enables users to take information and resources from different servers in a cluster and deliver that information on one platform. Using Mesos, organizations can share resources more efficiently across multiple applications, and the tool is designed to scale with organizations as their resources grow.

Average salary: $165,788

Rust

Created by a software developer at Mozilla in 2006 as a personal project, Rust is a programing language that has a strong focus on performance, type safety, and concurrency. Mozilla officially sponsored the project in 2009 and released the language in 2015, where it was then rapidly adopted by organizations such as Amazon, Google, Discord, Dropbox, Meta, and Microsoft. Rust skills are commonly used for systems programming, web development, game development, networking, and developing software for embedded systems.

Average salary: $165,637

Elixir

Elixir is a functional programming language that was designed to support scalability, fault tolerance, metaprogramming, tooling, and concurrency. The language was built on the BEAM virtual machine and is most used in web development and when building real-time messaging systems, IoT applications, and distributed systems. Elixir skills revolve around web development, developing distributed systems, enabling real-time communication in chat applications, and running background processing tasks.

Average salary: $165,245