As other tech sectors show signs of slowing, cloud services have created unprecedented demand for highly educated engineers and mathematicians who can build and operate these flywheels of data. Instead of asking about the latest computer coding languages or how to make a web page load faster, the most important question in tech hiring has become: Can you handle petabytes? That is the data in about 13 billion images, or roughly the amount of printed information that would fit in 20 million file cabinets.

In the Bay Area, $125,000 a year is not an uncommon salary for someone newly out of graduate school with the expertise to do cloud computing work. With five years of experience, $300,000 along with a range of stock or job opportunities that greatly inflate the value of those paychecks have become the norm.

“It’s an aggressive market,” said Corey Sanders, director of program management at Microsoft Azure. “We are all data engineers now, and we can convince people that this is the best place to learn that.”

The ability to deal with so much data has also become important to industrial companies like General Electric in figuring out things like jet engine maintenance schedules. G.E.’s pitch to cloud computing experts: We offer a chance to rebuild the industrial world.

In the last three years, G.E. has hired 1,500 software developers and systems engineers, and trained a similar number of existing employees to work on cloud systems connected to everything from smartphones to wind turbines and jet engines.

“We’ve hired from every large company, places like Amazon and Google, as well as start-ups, or out of schools,” said William Ruh, the head of G.E.’s cloud business. “We pay well, with attractive benefits, a life and a chance to work on the mission to remake American industry.”

Still, he said, “I’m totally shocked at how fast compensation is moving up.”

For smaller companies, the gold rush is more complicated. In San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood, Tom Chavez runs a company called Krux that scans data from more than three billion devices, creating a trove of seven petabytes of information retrieved by several hundred companies. Many of his 160 or so employees are just the kind of people the giants, along with other start-ups, are looking for.