Trey Grainger

Technical Advisor - AI-Powered Search

2024 - Current

Founder

2020

Building the next generation of Search. We serve as an AI-powered search advisory and development firm for some of the world's most innovative companies.

Author

2019

Writing "AI-Powered Search" book (Manning, 2024)

Adjunct Professor of Computer Science

2024

Advisor

2016

Member of the Advisory Board for the Southern Data Science Conference, the preeminent data science conference across the south-eastern united states.

Chief Technology Officer

2020 - 2023

Building a next-generation, decentralized web search engine powered by the community.

Advisor

2017 - 2020

Advisor

2020 - 2022

Chief Algorithms Officer

2018 - 2020

Drove vision and practical application of intelligent search and data science techniques impacting hundreds of the world’s brightest companies. Worked closely with customers and publicly as a thought leader at the intersection of Search and AI.

SVP Engineering

2016 - 2018

Engineering executive responsible for leading Lucidworks' globally-distributed, remote-first engineering team. Worked closely with Product Management to drive vision and development of both open source Apache Lucene/Solr and the company's industry-leading commercial search platform (Lucidworks Fusion). Met or exceeded aggressive ARR targets every single quarter and achieved world class customer retention, with net retention in stratospheric territory (140%).

Founder and Chief Engineer

2009 - 2019

I created Celiaccess.com, the gluten-free search engine and networking site. I engineered the site's entire framework (front-end and back-end) and continue to set the strategic vision for the company. Celiaccess allows its thousands of daily visitors to update and comment on the viability of any product and restaurant for those maintaining a gluten-free lifestyle. This information is extended beyond the website through mobile phone apps, including a gluten-free product barcode scanner and a GPS-based gluten-free restaurant locator. The site receives well over a million hits per year and the mobile apps have been installed over one hundred thousand times.

Guest Lecturer

2016 - 2019

Guest Lecturer for various university courses and public trainings: Georgia Tech • CSE6242: Data & Visual Analytics Spring 2016 Taught guest lecture on "Reflected Intelligence: Evolving self-learning data systems" Furman University • CSC272: Introduction to Data Mining, Analytics, and Knowledge Discovery Fall 2017 Taught guest lecture on "Intent Algorithms: The Data Science of Smart Information Retrieval Systems" Southern Data Science Conference • "AI-powered Search" training September 2022 • "Smart Search" training April 2019

Director of Engineering, Search & Recommendations

2014 - 2016

I lead the engineering department that develops CareerBuilder's global search platform. This primarily includes building data science and software engineering teams that can evolve our scalable search platform, our recommendation engine algorithms, and our Big Data analytics products. We specialize in employment search - job search and candidate search - building search and recommendation systems to match the right person with the right job. I have over 7 years of management experience and search expertise (plus previous engineering experience), work at the world's leading job search and analytics company, have bootstrapped a startup company, am author of a book on the Apache Solr search engine, and have also several published research papers in the data science space. I also speak frequently at industry conferences on cutting edge developments in the search and recommendations space. My primary interest is in deriving intelligence from interesting text data sets, particularly through the application of machine learning algorithms at scale.

Director of Engineering, Search & Analytics

2014 - 2014

I led the engineering department that develops CareerBuilder's global search platform. This primarily included building data science and software engineering teams that can evolved our scalable search platform, our recommendation engine algorithms, and our Big Data analytics products. We specialized in employment search - job search and candidate search - building search and recommendation systems to match the right person with the right job.

Search Technology Development Manager

2012 - 2014

I managed and served as a systems architect for several teams of software engineers developing CareerBuilder's core search and recommendation technologies and evolving new industry-leading products for data analytics on unstructured and semi-structured data. We were focused on handling hundreds of millions of documents, responding to thousands of queries per second, and dynamically scaling our search platform to easily handle our rapidly growing data volumes while maintaining significantly sub-second search speeds. I was also an occasional speaker at industry conferences on Apache Solr and search technology development and innovations.

Search Technology Development Team Lead

2008 - 2012

I led a team of software engineers in the development of our core search technology and the evolution of new industry-leading products for data analytics on unstructured and semi-structured data. In 2009-2010, I led a small team of engineers and contractors through a successful (ahead of time and budget) one year conversion to Apache Solr and away from the Microsoft FAST ESP search platform. I was responsible for architecting the initial version of CareerBuilder’s cloud-like search API exposing search as a simple, dynamic, and powerful generic service abstracted away from a large, globally-distributed architecture. I led the building of systems handling thousands or queries per second and hundreds of millions of documents across thousands of solr indexes. My technical experience in this role includes handling multi-lingual content across dozens of markets/languages, machine learning, genetic algorithm and user group based relevancy tuning, geo-spatial search and validation, and work on customized payload scoring models, data mining, clustering, and recommendations.

Software Engineer II

2008 - 2008

I developed CareerBuilder's A/B user testing framework which is used to conduct experiments with millions of site visitors every month. I helped to modernize CareerBuilder's job search and job viewing process through the development of a lazy-loading Ajax framework which reduced page load speed by over 50%. I helped develop a framework for identifying and tagging potentially malicious job postings. I worked with business development and a large, external software vendor to successfully and painlessly introduce a unified advertising system platform-wide in a nearly impossible timeline, resulting in millions of additional dollars in revenue. I performed an extensive analysis of our search capabilities and laid out a road-map for opportunities to drastically improve our search capabilities going forward.

Software Engineer I

2007 - 2008

I was responsible for double-digit jumps in CareerBuilder's SEO rankings by developing CareerBuilder's search engine optimized url generating and parsing engine, localized across over a dozen languages. I also developed CareerBuilder's first map-based search interface and helped write both an Ajax-based front-end user interface and a back-end geocoding layer for validating street addresses.