Top ten highest paying IT jobs of 2015

IT companies are on a constant lookout for niche skill sets to hold their ground in the competitive marketplace. That being said, some skills are more frequently requested than others, as demonstrated by Dice’s latest analysis of its online job postings.

Check out the these highest paying jobs that can change the rules of the game.

1. Cloudera Impala 
Average salary: $139,874

Cloudera Impala is an open-source MPP SQL query engine for mining data stored in Apache Hadoop clusters. Given the enduring popularity of Apache Hadoop, which is used by a growing number of businesses to sort through massive amounts of data, it’s no surprise that a platform meant to query Apache Hadoop data would top the list as 2014’s fastest-trending skill.

2. Adobe Experience Manager
Average salary: $123,599

The Adobe Experience Manager tool, designed for organizing and managing creative assets, is popular among marketers, advertising-agency creative professionals and others who craft content.

3. Ansible
Average salary: $124,860

System administrators rely on the open-source tool, Ansible, to help them configure and manage PCs.

4. Xamarin 
Average salary: $101,707

Given the burgeoning state of app development, it’s no wonder professionals with this skill are in growing demand. Developers who want to rapidly build iOS and Android apps can use Xamarin to develop cross-platform in C#.

5. OnCue
Average salary: $125,067

While video streaming is big, it remains to be seen whether this Web-based TV service, currently owned by Verizon, will continue to hold a spot in Dice’s Top 10 List.

6. Laravel 
Average salary: $96,219

Laravel is one of the more popular open-source PHP Web application frameworks. With growing interest on tech social channels like Github, usage and demand for this skill should only increase.

7. RStudio
Average salary: $117,257

This integrated development environment for R (a statistical programming language that’s proven a lucrative specialty for skilled developers) allows teams to share workspaces.

8. Unified Functional Testing 
Average salary: $102,419

Hewlett-Packard’s Unified Functional Testing platform gives tech pros the ability to comprehensively test software platforms and ecosystems; it’s also Windows-centric, which dovetails perfectly with most office environments.

9. Object Pascal 
Average salary: $77,907

Although Pascal has been around for 45 years, it’s still very much in use, with a subset of job postings on Dice.com for candidates who have experience with Object Pascal (a well-known derivative).

10. Apache Kafka
Average salary: $134,950

Apache Kafka is an open-source tool developed by the Apache Software Foundation for maintaining real-time data feeds, capable of handling hundreds of megabytes of writes and reads per second from thousands of clients. Kafka’s cluster-centric design, with an emphasis on fault-tolerance and durability, makes it a favorite among an expanding subset of developers.