Employers and recruiters who specialize in data-intensive industries know that the salaries for data analysts and scientists have skyrocketed in recent years. Tech pros with a solid grasp of analytics tools and data fundamentals are often worth their weight in gold, especially if they have the necessary experience (and intuition) to glean insights from all that data. If you’re planning on recruiting a data specialist in the short term, take a look at Dice’s latest salary survey. As you probably expect, tech pros with abilities in data warehousing and analytics are still pulling down high salaries. But which skills pay the most? That knowledge can certainly help with your future recruiting efforts.
1. MapReduce
Salary: $125,009 Year-over-year change: -0.3 percent Database administrators, data scientists, and other tech pros tasked with storing and processing data rely on MapReduce as a vital tool. A programming model for processing large datasets in parallel, MapReduce can speed up projects (although such speed benefits are not necessarily guaranteed) and introduce added reliability by delegating operations to different nodes within a network.
2. HBase
Salary: $123,934 Year-over-year change: 5.7 percent Modeled on Google’s Bigtable, and written in Java, HBase is a non-relational, distributed database that runs on top of the ever-popular Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Database administrators and analysts rely on it as a fault-tolerant way to store large amounts of information, boosted by features such as compression, per-column filters, and in-memory operation.
3. Cassandra
Salary: $123,459 Year-over-year change: 2.2 percent Cassandra’s open-source management system can handle data across multiple datacenters and servers. While that sounds like a lot of other tools on the market, experts prize Cassandra for its low latency, especially at scale.
4. Apache Kafka
Salary: $122,728 Year-over-year change: N/A Developed by the Apache Software Foundation, and written in Scala, Apache Kafka provides a unified, low-latency platform for handling data-feeds in real time. The platform can handle hundreds of megabytes of writes and reads per second; its design, with an emphasis on clusters, is also notable for its fault tolerance.
5. Elasticsearch
Salary: $120,002 Year-over-year change: N/A A Java-based search server built on Lucene, an open-source information retrieval software library, Elasticsearch offers a RESTful web interface and schema-free JSON documents. It is paired with Logstash, a data-collection and log-parsing engine, and Kibana, an analytics and visualization platform, into what is known by many as the “ELK Stack” or “Elastic Stack.” Companies rely on this stack to provide insights into both structured and unstructured data.
6. Pig
Salary: $119,118 Year-over-year change: -4.2 percent Birthed within Yahoo’s research division as a way of executing MapReduce jobs on huge datasets, Pig (which relies on a specialized language known as Pig Latin) lets developers create programs that run on Hadoop.
7. Solr
Salary: $119,032 Year-over-year change: 0.1 percent Solr, a Java-based enterprise search platform, is similar to Elasticsearch in that it originated in the Apache Lucene project. Features include faceted search, database integration, rich document handling, and, of course, text search. Larger companies leverage Solr because it’s considered highly scalable.
8. Hadoop
Salary: $118,625 Year-over-year change: -2.5 percent At this point, even people with only glancing knowledge of Big Data know the term “Apache Hadoop.” Even if it hasn’t achieved the ubiquity that some pundits predicted years ago (a December 2015 study from Dresner Advisory Services, for example, had only 17 percent of responding companies saying they stored and managed data via Hadoop), it’s still a platform that many firms rely upon for running data applications on large hardware clusters. For those companies looking for improved ease-of-use and faster data processing, various software vendors continue to maintain proprietary Hadoop distributions.
9. Hive
Salary: $118,589 Year-over-year change: -1.3 percent Hive, a database system built atop Hadoop, includes a specialized variant of SQL that allows experts to create tables and store data across a distributed Hadoop file system. As with other platforms on this list, the emphasis is on performance optimization.
10. RabbitMQ
Salary: $116,909 Year-over-year change: N/A RabbitMQ, written in Erlang and built on the Open Telecom Platform framework, is open-source message-broker software (a.k.a., message-oriented middleware). It features client libraries for all major programming languages.
