Rick Hightower
Austin, Texas Metropolitan Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRick Hightower is a Principal Architect and AI engineer with 22 years building high-performance, production-grade distributed systems and agentic AI that reliably automate complex enterprise workflows. Based in Austin, he has led large-scale ML/AI and streaming platforms at Capital One and enterprise AI orchestration at Cloudurable/Spillwave, delivering solutions that turn months of manual analysis into hours while improving accuracy dramatically. A long-time open-source author and maintainer (QBit, Reakt, Boon, contributions to the widely used nats.java client), he pairs deep JVM and reactive programming expertise with production DevOps—Kubernetes, Terraform, multi-cloud orchestration and real-time messaging. He invented high-throughput components (fast JSON parsers, disk batchers) and pioneered context-aware integrations like his Model Context Protocol work to keep agents from hallucinating or failing in production. Known as a “talent magnet,” Rick blends hands-on coding and architecture with mentoring and platform leadership across finance, legal, and government domains. His uncommon strength is turning bleeding-edge LLM techniques (RAG, embeddings, HyDE) into auditable, production-safe systems that scale.
22 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science: Business and Information Technology (Brick and mortar not online) Business and Information Technology, Bachelor of Science: Business and Information Technology (Brick and mortar not online) Business and Information Technology at University of Phoenix (Brick and Mortar in Phoenix AZ not online.)
Stackoverflow
11reputation
2kreached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (12)
javas10
webclient10
nat10
messaging10
natsio10
clientside10
java10
concurrency10
multithreading9
testing8
spring6
spring-roo6
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
nats-io/nats.java
Apr 2020 - Sep 2022
Java client for NATS
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 26 reviews, 26 commits in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Rick primarily focused on enhancing the NATS Java client. Their contributions involved addressing race conditions within the connection close process and resolving reconnection issues, improving the client's stability and reliability. They implemented changes related to message queue management, including output queue handling, and addressed issues related to message publishing performance and potential queue overflows. Furthermore, they contributed to benchmark and testing infrastructure, adding tests and resolving issues.
javanatsmessagingmessaging-librarymiddleware
SpillwaveSolutions/agent-brain
Dec 2025 - Jul 2026
Private RAG system with semantic context ingestion to improve source of truth of reliable sources
Contributions:10 releases, 29 PRs, 117 pushes in 6 months
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