Management, but like on an imperial scale. The work of a lot of high paid individuals has to do with managing the distribution of surplus value extracted from the periphery or creating tools to "disrupt" markets and open them up to imperial exploitation.

The Foundation trilogy did a good job of showing a sorta pure form of this with Terminus. A planet that produces nothing, but holds within it the wealth of solar systems. The entire surface down 3 miles is a giant city housing tens of billions of bureaucrats that manage the surplus of an entire galaxy. They're all well paid and incapable of seeing the reality of the periphery.

They all think they're more developed and advanced than the periphery planets, but then Seldon comes around and predicts the fall of the Empire using psycho-hostory (like a sci-fi dialectical materialism). It eventually comes true and the enclave Seldon built on the outskirts of the Galaxy begins the work of rebuilding galactic society while progressing through the productive stages.

In this case, those jobs are created by the Empire, in reality, those jobs are just unproductive labor aristocrats that are given the value of their labor plus a small piece of the international surplus by the international bourgeoisie.