Engineering for eCommerce Search [AI Agent Workshop]

Everybody knows semantic search is a commodity now. So what's the problem with search? Well, what happens when a search for “iPhone” returns iPhone cases? When an exact part number fails because someone added a dash? Or when page one is technically relevant, but commercially useless? In this hands-on workshop with Qdrant, Neil will walk us through a real product catalog and tackle the retrieval and ranking problems that actually affect businesses. You’ll experiment with: Hybrid search — combine semantic understanding with exact SKU and brand matching Filtering & ranking — keep results relevant under tight product constraints Business signals — bring stock, margin, freshness, and delivery into scoring Scale & performance — see what happens to latency, recall, and cost as the catalog grows 🏁 And yes, it’s competitive. Everyone starts with the same catalog, baseline, and eval harness. You’ll use your coding assistant to improve the system and see how your approach performs. The goal isn’t just to win the benchmark. It’s to leave knowing which knobs to turn when search goes wrong — and how to prove your fix actually worked. 👋 Who Should Join? Anyone building infra behind product discovery, E-commerce and marketplace engineers, search and relevance teams, platform engineers will enjoy this! Come for the workshop. Stay for the food, drinks, and people. 🍕🍻 Space is limited — register early. The AI Collective is a global non-profit building the human layer for the AI era. We unite 200,000+ leaders, builders, and stakeholders across 100+ forums worldwide to democratize the frontier, build trust, and coordinate how society navigates the rapid acceleration of technological progress. Code & Coffee is a meetup for developers to make friends and grow, active in over 30 cities. 100% volunteer-led and volunteer-run, with 80,000+ devs and growing.