Data Scientist, DevOps Engineer and DBA Top IT Jobs for 2017

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It’s a good time to be an IT pro looking for a job that not only pays well, but is also fulfilling.

Career site Glassdoor has compiled a list of the 50 best jobs in the U.S. for 2017. This year’s list is liberally sprinkled with technology jobs, surprising few who have monitoring the increasing demand for IT talent as firms wrestle with digital transformation and pursue opportunities in a technology-driven global economy.

“Data Scientist claims the top spot for the second year in a row, followed by DevOps Engineer (#2) and Data Engineer (#3),” noted the company in a blog post. Jobs are ranked according to their overall score, which the company’s bloggers explained “is determined using three key factors: earning potential based on median annual base salary, job satisfaction rating and number of job openings. The jobs that made this list stand out across all three categories.”

For example, the position of data scientist leads with an overall score of 4.8 (out of 5), a healthy job satisfaction rating is a healthy 4.4 and a median base salary of $110,000. Currently, there are over 4,000 job openings for data scientists in the U.S.

Also with a starting salary of $110,000 but with far fewer openings (2,725 as of this writing), is the title of DevOps engineer. With a job score of 4.7 and a job satisfaction rating of 4.2, DevOps engineers help organizations keep their application development and deployment effort on track.

Data engineers (third place) skilled in preparing data for analytics applications can expect to pull in $106,000 to start. Nearly 2,600 such positions remain unfilled in the U.S.

In seventh place is the role of database administrator (DBA). Tasked with configuring, managing and maintaining the overall health of their organization’s critical business databases, DBAs command a starting salary of $93,000.

UX (user experience) designers can use their technical and design expertise to bring home a starting salary of over $92,000. This ninth-place career has a job satisfaction score of 4 and nearly 1,700 openings. With more than 17,000 job openings, coders can make $101,000 as software engineers (16th place).

Other IT-related positions on the list include mobile developer (26th place, $85,000 base salary), systems administrator (27th place, $68,000 base salary), and information security engineer (39th place, $100,000 base salary).

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.