[2] Hightower grew up in Long Beach, California, then moved to Atlanta, Georgia with his mother as he was beginning high school.

[3] Hightower then briefly worked at a small Portland startup called Monsoon Commerce, at which he wrote confd, his first open-source project.

"[5][6] In 2014, while working for CoreOS, Hightower became an active evangelist of Kubernetes, and began to speak widely on the topic at developer conferences.

[8] In 2015, he co-founded the Kubernetes-focused conference KubeCon, which he then turned over to be managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in subsequent years.

[3] In 2019, Hightower was co-chair of the O'Reilly Open Source Convention and on the governing board of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.