Principal Software Engineer Melvin Hillsman hopes to be an example.
For some who pursue careers in technology, an early touchpoint could be tinkering with a computer or experimenting in a science class. For Hillsman, this wasn’t the case. He was not raised around tech, nor did he have a computer. He was raised in an underdeveloped area in Houston, TX, and recalls playing around in the mud and pig pens with his cousins for some of his childhood. His foray into tech was not linear. He worked at companies including McDonald’s and Whataburger, served as a waiter for a few bucks, and even worked in construction.
“I grew up a little bit naive, for lack of better words. And then got around a little more urban kids, I guess you could say, and went on a trajectory of, I guess what’s common with a lot of young Black men and urban areas,” he told AFROTECH™ in an exclusive interview.
Hillsman would later work at a church, seeking greater financial stability. He did not attend college and dropped out of high school in 11th grade. He gained experience building websites, becoming more seasoned with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Eventually, he began charging people to host their websites.
When the church cut budgets, he leaned into prayer. Ultimately, a billboard advertising a tech role captured capture his attention and this led to him become a junior administrator at Hostgator.com for nearly three years. He started with system admin work and later was promoted to linux system administrator before transitioning to Rackspace, a leading managed cloud company that he describes as his “biggest leap in understanding how things work in tech.”
He grew his understanding of OpenStack, which he describes as a “collection of various computing or IT-related things,” citing authorization, identity management and computing as key pieces.
“OpenStack was kind of that virtualization management piece. So virtual machines started coming in, but there was no popular or well-established system to manage them. And that’s what OpenStack was bringing in,” he recalled.
Throughout Hillsman’s career he has transitioned into several other roles, but since 2022, he has remained a principal software engineer at Red Hat. He describes the post as more of a leadership role, which he gained experience in while at Rackspace, working in open source and leading a small team of software developers.
“The reason why I’m a principal software engineer is because essentially, I grew as a developer. I did the additional work necessary, which is cross-team technical leadership,” Hillsman said.
The work is “a little more hands-off in terms of diving deep into the code. Even though you can do that, you’re coming from the top-down approach,” he added.
AFROTECH™ Conference
Hillsman hopes his career inspires others and proves the power of representation. He will be a speaker at the 2025 AFROTECH™ Conference. The tech mecca returns to Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center from Oct. 27-31.
“This stage is where tech meets culture, and I can’t wait to bring the heat alongside so many other trailblazers…This isn’t just a conference; it’s the largest gathering of Black technologists, investors, founders, and Fortune 500 companies in the world. If you’re pulling up, I’ll see you there,” Hillsman expressed in a post shared on LinkedIn.
You can purchase your tickets here.
