About Me

I've worked in the search and ML industry for over 18 years, focusing on areas like query understanding, knowledge graphs, metadata enrichment and semantic search. This background has proven valuable in the field of AI engineering, particularly for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems.

Currently, I'm the Head of AI and Search Intelligence at SearchStax, a major managed Solr provider. In this role, I've:

• Developed SearchStax's internal AI engineering framework
• Built and hired the AI Engineering team from the ground-up
• Mentored the engineers and engineering leaders and helped them make the transition to AI Engineering
• Acted as Subject Matter Expert for all things related to LLMs
• Successfully led various RAG projects to production
• Integrated AI and LLM technologies into our search solutions

My experience with search relevance has been directly applicable to improving retrieval quality in RAG systems. I've found that many of the challenges in AI-powered information retrieval are similar to those I've encountered in traditional search optimization.

As an AI engineering coach, I help software teams apply their existing skills to AI projects. This often involves:

• Adapting search expertise to RAG systems
• Implementing effective evaluation frameworks for AI models
• Navigating the transition from traditional software development to AI-centric approaches

I'm familiar with the common hurdles teams face when moving into AI engineering, and I provide practical strategies to overcome them.