Kathleen DeRusso
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.
Company/Organization:
Elastic
Session
05-07
10:05
45min
Evolution of Relevance Engineering to Context Engineering
Kathleen DeRusso
As search powers RAG and agentic systems, relevance goals shift from ranking documents to assembling effective context. This talk explores how traditional lexical, semantic, and hybrid relevance changes when feeding LLMs, with lessons on chunking and snippet extraction, diversification, evaluation, and more.
Main Stage