Alessandro Benedetti
Director, R&D Software Engineer, Search Consultant at The Apache Software Foundation
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlessandro Benedetti is a Director and R&D software engineer with 15 years specialising in search, information retrieval, NLP and machine learning, and founder of Sease Ltd where he drives R&D, client consultancies and open-source contributions. A long-standing Apache committer and current chair of the Apache Solr PMC, he has hands-on experience improving search relevancy at scale for organisations like BBC, Barclays and the British Library and has contributed notable fixes to Apache Lucene’s suggest module. He blends deep theoretical rigor in data structures, algorithms and probability with pragmatic production engineering—designing SolrCloud architectures, learning-to-rank integrations and vector/LLM-powered search prototypes. An experienced teacher and presenter, he has delivered research-to-production talks at FOSDEM, ECIR and Open Source Summit, and he pairs technical leadership with strong client-facing consulting skills. Outside work he organises sports events and is an avid beach volleyball player and snowboarder, a detail that underscores his team-focused, high-energy approach to problem solving.
15 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (M.Sc.), Computer Science, Master of Science (M.Sc.), Computer Science at Università degli studi Roma TRE
English, Italian, latino, Spanish
Stackoverflow
1,114reputation
81kreached
62answers
3questions
solr
top-5%
Github Skills (15)
lucene10
javas10
search-engine10
information-retrieval10
java10
searching9
backend9
solr9
testing8
elasticsearch6
full-text-search6
solrcloud6
solrnet6
apache-tika6
apache6
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
apache/lucene
Mar 2021 - Mar 2025
Apache Lucene open-source search software
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:41 reviews, 8 PRs, 7 pushes in 4 years
Contributions summary:Alessandro primarily contributed to the Apache Lucene search software, focusing on the `suggest` module. Their work involved implementing checks for weight and positional coefficient scaling and writing tests. The commits included modifying Java code related to the BlendedInfixSuggester class, specifically addressing the ranking of suggestions based on position matches, even with zero or small weights.
nosqlfulltext-searchsolrapachesearch-engine
sourcesense/jira-multi-level-cascade-select
Dec 2010 - Apr 2012
Jira Multi level cascade select
Contributions:39 commits in 1 year 3 months
cascademulti-leveljira
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