Trey Grainger

• Founded company focused on building the next generation of search engine technology
• Provide AI-powered search development, advisory, and training for some of the world's most innovative companies

• Lead author of the book AI-Powered Search (Manning 2024)

• Member of the Advisory Board for the Southern Data Science Conference, the preeminent data science conference across the southeastern united states

• Served as CTO, responsible for both product management and engineering
• Designed and and build decentralized web search engine powered by over 70,000 nodes worldwide run by community members powering millions of searches per day from millions of monthly active users
• Responsible for operations of technology platform, as well as hiring and management of engineering team

Guest Lecturer for various university courses:

Georgia Tech

• CSE6242: Data & Visual Analytics Course.

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

Provided consulting on AI-powered search approaches to Lucidworks and their customers

• Advised company on blockchain technology, token economics, and search engine technology design.
• Assisted with marketing and promotion
• Helped inform executive decisions around hiring for key roles, partnerships, and company vision and messaging

• 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.

• Created Celiaccess.com, the gluten-free search engine and networking site
• Engineered the site's entire framework (front-end and back-end) and set the strategic vision for the company
• Platform allowed thousands of daily visitors to update and comment on the viability of any product and restaurant for those maintaining a gluten-free lifestyle
• Built mobile phone apps, including a gluten-free product barcode scanner and a GPS-based gluten-free restaurant locator
• The site received well over a million hits per year and the mobile apps were installed over one hundred thousand times

• 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%).
• Helped company sustain and improve on > 50% annual revenue growth while in my role

• Led the engineering department that develops CareerBuilder's global search, analytics, and recommendation engine platforms
• This primarily includes building data science and software engineering teams that can evolve a scalable search platform, recommendation engine algorithms, and Big Data analytics products
• Managed a team of 30+ managers, team leads, and individual contributors (software engineers, data scientists, and data analysts)

• Led the engineering department that develops CareerBuilder's global search engine and analytics platforms
• This primarily included building software engineering teams to evolve a scalable search platform and power Big Data analytics products

Co-authored the book Solr in Action (Manning 2014)

• 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
• Platform was responsible for handling hundreds of millions of documents, responding to thousands of queries per second, and dynamically scaling to easily handle rapidly growing data volumes while maintaining significantly sub-second search speeds
• Occasional speaker at industry conferences on search engine technology.

• 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, 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
• 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
• Led the building of systems handling thousands or queries per second and hundreds of millions of documents across thousands of Apache Solr search indexes
• 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.

• Developed CareerBuilder's A/B user testing framework which was used to conduct experiments with millions of site visitors every month
• 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%
• Helped develop a framework for identifying and tagging potentially malicious job postings
• 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
• Performed an extensive analysis of our search capabilities and laid out a road-map for opportunities to drastically improve our search capabilities going forward.

• Built consumer-facing web pages powering job searches and leading to over one million job applications per day
• Designed and implemented a first-of-its-kind map-based search interface, partnering with Microsoft
• Discovered and helped fix a major security issue during my first week