Doug's guidance played an important role in helping us evolve and scale our retrieval and search capabilities at CreatorAds.
Doug Turnbull
Led retrieval at Reddit+Shopify
Technology consulting looks completely different in 2026. And most search consulting firms haven't figured that out.
I'm a retrieval scientist and engineer, I built early rerankers at Shopify, Reddit, and Wikipedia. I co-authored AI Powered Search and Relevant Search. I've shipped better search at dozens of companies. I've educated or worked with teams at OpenAI, Apple, AWS, Uber, and many more.
Now with the advent of agentic coding, my decade plus of experience has been supercharged. Instead of big strategic reports and pointless slidedecks, I speak in working code.
What's better than a report? A working prototype.
Agentic coding is the super-human harness to my search experience.
With the rise of AI coding agents, I can quickly rebuild your ranking implementation and show possible improvements. I demo them to your team, coach them on improvements, and provide ongoing fractional leadership.
I often just need a test corpus, a set of queries, a sense of whats broken to show you what could be better. Typically in as little as a few weeks.
Your team has plenty of ideas, but not indepth search expertise to seperate expensive dead-ends from quick-wins. I'll take an active role guiding your search efforts, educate your team, and investigate your toughest challenges.
As an advisor:
Doug's guidance played an important role in helping us evolve and scale our retrieval and search capabilities at CreatorAds.
Doug was an exceptional team lead — he knew how to surface the team’s strongest ideas and guide us toward a direction we all genuinely believed in. He was also fundamental in establishing the technical foundations that drove major improvements in Shop Search relevance.
Top notch content with relevant side bars to make the concepts real. Great blend of concepts and hands on. You come away with code to run and study, so you can really absorb the material. Strongly recommend.
Very helpful course, I learned about PCA, quantization and HNSW graph traversal. The best part is that Doug codes in front of you and you also get access to the private slack channel where you can ask follow-up questions.