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If you are interested in exploring roles on the Vectara team, take a look at our open positions.
Join VectaraAbout Vectara
Vectara’s mission is to help the world find meaning through search. The company uses the latest innovations in artificial intelligence and neural network technologies for natural language processing to deliver
The Future of Search
The way people search is changing. We believe that search in every application - SaaS app, mobile app, ecommerce site, media property, website, enterprise data-lake and beyond - will be powered by semantic search within the next five years. As AI powers search, search itself will provide the primary response for almost every question, by both human and application requests, for information retrieval, related content, recommendations, and user intent across document, image, video and voice.
What Problem Do We Solve?
Until recently, search technologies have been keyword based. With advances in the use of AI and natural language processing, Vectara is expanding the role and application of search. Vectara’s semantic search platform delivers dramatic improvement in understanding questions and answering with more relevant information. Vectara is different from any search you have used prior:
- Vectara provides developers a pure neural search platform with production-ready natural language processing.
- Vectara empowers developers to embed search within their applications using a fully API-addressable platform with a complete, composable search pipeline.
- Vectara enables support and marketing solutions that allow you to respond faster and more accurately by understanding the true meaning of your user's words and questions.
About Vectara
Vectara is a semantic search software company that enables customers to understand exactly what their users are asking - no matter how they ask - to provide
Our Founders and Management
Dr. Amr Awadallah
Co-Founder & CEO
Prior to founding Vectara, Amr served as the VP of Developer Relations for Google Cloud. Amr co-founded Cloudera where he led the development of enterprise tools to ingest and extract value from big data. Before Cloudera, Amr served as VP of product intelligence engineering at Yahoo after Yahoo acquired his first startup Aptiva, a search engine company. Amr holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a MA from Cairo University.
Amin Ahmad
Co-Founder & CTO
Prior to founding Vectara, Amin served as a senior engineer at Google Research for 10 years. Amin led the development of question answering and neural information retrieval systems that have been launched into several Google products. His 20 years of search industry experience include working with Fortune 500 companies, startups, and state and federal governments. Amin holds a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics from Bowling Green State University.
Dr. Tallat Shafaat
Co-Founder & Chief Architect
Prior to founding Vectara, Tallat served as a Senior Software Engineer for Google Search and Google Ads. He was a core member of the Google Knowledge Graph indexing team, where he designed and implemented systems that processed petabytes of data and serviced up to 200,000 queries per second. Tallat holds a PhD in Distributed Systems from KTH Sweden.
Ed Albanese
Chief Operating Officer
Before Vectara, Ed served as VP and Area GM for IoT and as the Global Area VP for Manufacturing, Energy, Retail at Splunk. Prior, Ed was CEO and Founder of Krypton, a SaaS data analytics platform acquired by Splunk in 2018. He has also served in senior management roles at Cloudera, MongoDB and in product management at VMware. Ed earned an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from the University of Virginia.
Shane Connelly
Head of Product
Before joining Vectara, Shane led product management teams at Kong, a flagship API gateway company, and for Elasticsearch at Elastic. Before that, Shane was a product manager for several products in the Autonomy / HP Software suite. Shane has over a decade of experience working in developer-focused search, NLP, and machine learning systems. Shane holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Felicia Jeffley
Head of Staff
Before joining Vectara, Felicia managed a team of EAs on the Google Search team and worked directly with VPs as an Executive Business Partner in GEO and Cloud. She was also on the People Development team and held various other leadership roles leaning on her 20+ years of Executive Coaching experience. Felicia holds a BS in Marketing from the University of Arizona, Tucson.
Talip Ozturk
Head of Engineering
Before joining Vectara, Talip was an engineering manager at Google where he led the development of AlloyDB, a scalable relational database. Talip was a founder and CTO of Hazelcast, an in-memory database company that was used by all major banks in US and Europe to build financial applications. He has 22 years of experience in software development after he self learned how to code. Talip holds a BA in International Business from Johnson & Wales University.
Aileen Ajlouni
Head of Global Talent Acquisition
Before joining Vectara, Aileen held senior talent acquisition roles at Okta, Cohensity, Anomali, and Cloudera. Aileen's dynamic background in psychology is what fuels her passion of working with people and building relationships. Aileen holds a MA in Clinical Counseling from Alliant International University and a BS in Health Science from San Jose State University.
Justin Hayes
Head of Customer Success
Before joining Vectara, Justin led product management for databases at Cloudera. Before that, he was a Principal Architect at RedHat, helping customers from different industries adopt open source infrastructure. Justin has 20 years of experience helping customers adopt NLP, search, big data, cloud, and middleware technologies. Justin holds a MS in Computer Science from George Mason University and a BS in Computer Science from Wake Forest University.
Stephanie Wu
Controller
Before joining Vectara, Stephanie served as a controller and finance manager at startups and public companies for over 20 years. Her experience includes PwC, Juniper, Cloudera, and most recently a startup which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks. She has experience in international accounting, finance, tax, revenue and operations. Stephanie holds a MS in Accountancy from San Jose State University and BS in Agricultural Economics from UC Davis.
Our Investors
Additionally, many technology pioneers have invested in Vectara, including founders of WhatsApp, Slack, and Palantir.
See what people are saying about us!
Zafer Ipekci, CEO, Metus
Search relevance across different media types is a difficult engineering problem. Vectara is empowering us to differentiate from our current competitors in product performance and reliability
Erin Loy, VP Software Engineering, ApexChat
Vectara helps us understand the intent behind the thousands of requests our agents handle every day to provide faster responses and more accurate information. NLP-powered search is improving the way we serve our customers and their end-users
Eric Colson, Fmr Chief Algorithms Officer, Stitch Fix
I am very excited for how Vectara enables better search on product reviews. This will create tremendous value for both consumers and ecommerce companies.
Mike Olson, Cofounder, Cloudera
Vectara is opening the door to transformational change in search technology, not only delivering more accurate and relevant results but making cutting-edge neural technology accessible to almost any developer.
Shane Feldberg, Founder, Feld Ventures
Vectara's neural search is the future of how people will interact with content. They are solving a major problem, the founders are incredibly well suited for the task, and their early customer feedback is very promising.
Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product, Google
Vectara is the first platform that harnesses NLP’s transformative power and makes it practical and useful, empowering developers everywhere with the most advanced AI available.
Rob Solomon, Board Director, GoFundMe.org
Vectara represents a huge leap forward in search technology. Offering neural search-as-a-service, the platform provides a complete solution that gives developers API access to the most advanced NLP & AI site-level search in just minutes.
Stewart Butterfield, CEO, Slack Technologies
Most people rely on search to navigate websites and applications, including our product, but the underlying technology has not significantly evolved in decades. By applying cutting-edge neural networks, Vectara is bringing much-needed innovation to improve product search.
Omar Tawakol, General Manager, Webex Cisco
Vectara is neural search as a service. The platform provides a complete search pipeline from extraction and indexing to retrieval, rerank and calibration. Every platform element is API-addressable. Developers can embed the most advanced NLP for app and site search in minutes.
Saqib E. Awan, Founder & Managing Director, GTM Capital
When Vectara presented their capabilities to our audience of hundreds of CIOs and CTOs from Global 2000 firms, customer reaction was incredibly positive. Many signed up for POCs after seeing the product. I knew right away that we found an incredible company and team in Vectara.
