Director of Engineering at Yelp for the Core Experience Relevance group

Daniel has worked in search since graduating in computational linguistics studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich in 2012 where he developed his weakness for search and natural language processing. His experience as a search consultant paved the way for becoming an O’Reilly author co-authoring the first German book on Apache Solr.
His current work focuses on leveraging AI agents to accelerate the next generation of search quality improvements.
In his free time he supports the local fire brigade as a volunteer firefighter and serves as the sports director of the local shooting club in the village he lives in.

David is a search engineer years of search experience as an Advocate for OpenSearch at AWS, an independent search consultant, and now deploying search for 100+ Million people at GitHub.

In 2012, Doug got bit by the search bug and he's still trying to keep up. From full-text search, to Learning to Rank models, to search agents that generate their own code, he knows the overwhelming landscape first hand. Yet Doug still works to deeply understand the what / how / why. He help teams use these technologies practically, distinguishing hype from reality.

He’s led search at Reddit, Shopify, and Wikipedia, authored Relevant Search and AI Powered Search, and advised 100+ organizations over the years - all in pursuit of the same question: how does search actually work?

Jon Handler is a Senior Principal Solutions Architect on the OpenSearch Service team at Amazon Web Services, based in Palo Alto, CA. Jon works closely with OpenSearch and Amazon OpenSearch Service, providing help and guidance to a broad range of customers who have search and log analytics workloads for OpenSearch. Prior to joining AWS, Jon’s career as a software developer included four years of coding a large-scale, eCommerce search engine. Jon holds a Bachelor of the Arts from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Master of Science and a Ph. D. in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from Northwestern University.

Kathleen DeRusso has built and scaled search applications across homegrown systems, Solr, and Elasticsearch. With deep experience in application search, she is a Principal Software Engineer at Elastic focused on search relevance, spanning lexical, semantic, and hybrid retrieval, and more recently, context engineering for LLM-driven systems. Kathleen is also an active member of the Women of Search community.

Kevin Butler is a Search & Data Infrastructure Consultant at KMW Technology. He specializes in OpenSearch pipelines, adaptive hybrid search, and agentic LangGraph-driven workflows. His work focuses on bridging retrieval models with dynamic real-time decision-making.

Product & Operations Manager at Adelean, I specialize in search, data, and complex systems, with a particular focus on e-commerce search engines.
I work on topics that combine architecture, relevance, product data, and technical decision-making.
Alongside this role, I am an elected member of a sports federation, where I contribute to digital transformation projects, giving me the opportunity to operate across a wide range of organizational contexts.
I also run a consulting business, delivering advisory, audit, and administrative and operational structuring engagements.
This dual product and consulting background allows me to bring a strong field-oriented perspective, grounded in real-world data and actual usage patterns.

As Chief Strategy Officer at OSC, René is focused on technical strategy and fulfilling the needs of our clients.

René has worked in search for almost two decades, including on projects for some of the top 10 German e-commerce sites. He is co-founder and co-organiser of MICES (Mix-Camp E-commerce Search), an event that brings together the e-commerce search community each year. His technological focus is on OpenSearch, Elasticsearch and Lucene. He created and maintains the Querqy open source library for query rewriting.

Software engineer at MongoDB. I work mostly on vector search using Lucene

Tim has been working in content/metadata extraction (and evaluation), advanced search and relevance tuning for more than 20 years. Tim currently works at elastic as a search relevance engineer. He is a member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the chair/VP of Apache Tika, and a committer on Apache OpenNLP, Nutch, Stormcrawler, Lucene/Solr, PDFBox and Apache POI. Tim holds a Ph.D. in Classical Studies, and in a former life, he was a professor of Latin and Greek.

Trey Grainger is lead author of the book AI-Powered Search (Manning 2025) and founder of Searchkernel, a software consultancy building the next generation of AI-powered search. He also serves as a technical advisor at OpenSource Connections.

He previously served as CTO of Presearch, a decentralized web search engine, and as Chief Algorithms Officer and SVP of Engineering at Lucidworks, a search company whose technology powers hundreds of the world’s leading organizations. Trey is also co-author of the book Solr in Action (Manning 2014), as well as over a dozen other publications including books, journals, and research papers. Trey has 18 years of experience in search and data science focused on building self-learning search platforms integrating the most successful AI Search techniques.

Trey teaches AI Search in the course AI-Powered Search: Modern Retrieval for Humans & Agents with Doug Turnbull.

Currently a search relevance engineer at turbopuffer. Former technical lead for the search and recommendation team at Guidepoint.

Ángel is the founder of Empathy.co