Search Technology Meetup - January 2026 edition

About this Event

We are very excited to announce another Search Tech Berlin Meetup. The meetup will be hosted and sponsored by Zalando (thank you!). **Agenda** 18:15 - Doors open 18:45 - Introduction 19:00 - **Talk: Samay Kapadia: Multi-Modal Embedding Search with modern VLMs** 19:40 - Networking, food & drinks 20:00 - **Talk: David Fennesey: Automating the tedium of golden sets with agentic flows** 20:40 - Let’s socialize and grab some drinks 21:00 - Doors closing **Talks** **1) Multi-Modal Embedding Search with modern VLMs** Samay Kapadia, Principal ML Engineer, Zalando Creating a state-of-the-art search embedding model for products, that supports both text and visual inputs. Since there are no open-weight multimodal embedding models, we will convert VLMs like Qwen3 and Ministral 3 into embedding models using LoRA (Low Rank Adapters). **2) David Fennesey: Automating the tedium of golden sets with agentic flows** David Fennesey, Principal Engineer, Flink Search relevancy optimization, such as taxonomies, labeling, and query classification, is expensive to build and painful to maintain. Modern reasoning LLMs, with a small agentic framework around them are easily capable of exploring, evaluating, and iterating through your data. This talk builds that workflow from scratch: tool calls for strategic exploration and guardrails to keep it in check. See you at the event René & Roman