Collin Hicks
Solutions Architect at BLACKWOOD
North Carolina, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolCollin Hicks is a Solutions Architect and cyber security specialist with 13 years of experience designing secure, scalable systems and embedding DevSecOps practices across cloud-native and distributed environments. He blends hands-on engineering—contributing to notable open-source projects such as Confluent’s ksql and Kafka REST proxy—with strategic leadership in Zero Trust architecture, SOC 2 compliance, and large-scale data pipelines. Collin has delivered high-throughput ETL and real-time location processing at scale using Spark, Kafka, AWS services, and Snowflake, and has led cross-functional teams to harden and monitor thousands of containerized services. Comfortable across the full stack, he pairs software engineering and cloud infrastructure expertise with applied security controls, and even integrates LLMs for operational validation of logistics workflows. Bilingual training in Spanish and a background spanning federal security consulting to product engineering give him a pragmatic, mission-focused approach to protecting complex systems.
13 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS, Software Engineering, Master of Science - MS, Software Engineering at University of Maryland Global CampusBachelor of Arts (B.A.), Spanish Language and Literature, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Spanish Language and Literature at The Citadel
Spanish, Portuguese
Github Skills (27)
serializable10
serializer10
back-end-development10
api-design10
clojure-cli10
testing10
kafka10
kafka-streams10
java10
serialization10
clojure10
javas10
deserialization10
exception-handling10
data-processing10
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
confluentinc/ksql
Oct 2018 - Jul 2022
The database purpose-built for stream processing applications.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:90 reviews, 52 commits, 62 PRs in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Collin contributed to fixing ambiguous `groupby` usage within KTable tests and correcting parameter types. They implemented a feature for custom column width support in the CLI, enhancing tabular output formatting. Furthermore, the user added documentation enhancements, including a version picker and Google Tag Manager integration for analytics within the documentation. They also addressed a security issue in the server code by avoiding interpreting requests as file uploads, and enabled Java clients to configure the HTTP/2 multiplex limit.
materialized-viewsstream-processingstreaming-queriesksqldbsql
confluentinc/kafka-rest
Nov 2018 - Dec 2018
Confluent REST Proxy for Kafka
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 5 PRs, 6 pushes in 7 days
Contributions summary:Collin primarily focused on bug fixes and code refactoring within the Kafka REST proxy. Their contributions addressed race conditions in consumer management and the merging of branches to ensure code stability and feature integration. They made changes to the consumer management code and updated the AdminClientWrapper, affecting consumer and topic operations within the Kafka REST Proxy. These modifications involved Java code changes and related infrastructure components, demonstrating their focus on backend development and its integration with Kafka.
schema-registryproxyconfluent-cloudrest-proxyrest
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