Search Technology Meetup - January 2026 edition

We are very excited to announce another Search Tech Berlin Meetup. The meetup will be hosted and sponsored by Zalando (thank you!).

Agenda

18:30 - Doors open
19:00 - Introduction
19:10 - Talk: Samay Kapadia: Multi-Modal Embedding Search with modern VLMs
19:50 - Networking, food & drinks
20:10 - Talk: David Fennesey: Automating the tedium of golden sets with agentic flows
20:50 - Let’s socialize and grab some drinks
21:30 - 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