Michele Riva
Philosophy, Research, and Graph Algorithms
San Francisco, California
I am a software engineer and entrepreneur based in San Francisco, California. I currently lead the engineering team at Orama, which I co-founded in 2023.
For over a decade, I have worked with startups and large companies in both product development and consultancy roles, deriving insights from both domains.
In 2022, I authored Real-World Next.js, published by Packt Publishing. The book draws on my work on Paramount's platform team, where I designed and implemented a high-performance, multitenant Node.js application server. This server powered over 250 streaming websites from a single, medium EC2 instance, handling up to 14,000 requests per second, with Next.js serving the front-end.
As a Staff Software Engineer at NearForm, I designed and built Orama — an incredibly fast and portable full-text and vector search engine written entirely in TypeScript without any external dependencies. In 2023, I founded a company based on Orama. Today, it powers millions of monthly search requests on major websites including nodejs.org and docs.deno.com, among others.
Over the past few years, I have spoken at approximately one hundred international conferences and meetups, covering topics such as software architecture, computer science, and related fields.
The system breaks a document search index into segments organized by document field and hash-based groupings of query terms, each containing a traversable index subtree, and publishes them on a content delivery network for distributed access.
A system automatically selects which document properties to include in a search index by using an inference model or by prompting a large language model with document contents and their associated property names.
A search index shard contains an executable routine that takes a query's semantic meaning representation, compares it against stored semantic representations of documents, and returns the IDs of documents whose meanings are within a threshold level of similarity to the query.
The Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) Award is a prestigious recognition given by Microsoft to exceptional technology experts who passionately share their knowledge and contribute to the tech community through leadership, advocacy, and technical expertise.
The Google Developer Expert (GDE) program is a global recognition for experienced professionals who demonstrate exceptional expertise in Google technologies and actively contribute to the developer community through advocacy, education, and collaboration.