Alex Guzhva
Principal Software Engineer at Zilliz
Jersey City, New Jersey, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex Guzhva is a Principal Software Engineer with 11 years of experience building high-performance CPU/GPU systems and similarity search engines, currently driving core search and performance work at Zilliz. He has deep expertise in modern C++ and low-level SIMD optimizations (AVX2/AVX512 and ARM SVE), contributing significant performance improvements to industry-standard projects like FAISS and Milvus. At Meta he delivered resource savings measured in the millions and worked on large-scale model compression and AITemplate for fast GPU inference. His background includes designing 24/7 trading infrastructure and custom ANN solutions for a hedge fund, blending research-grade rigor from a PhD in Computer Science with hands-on systems engineering. An early programmer who started coding at 11, he still focuses on squeezing real-world QPS and latency gains from hardware through careful microarchitecting.
11 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Lomonosov Moscow State University
English, Russian
Github Skills (18)
similarity-search10
c-language10
avx10
vector-database10
vectorization10
go10
performance-optimization10
simd10
cprogramming-language10
linear-algebra9
build-automation8
machine-learning8
testing8
nearest-neighbors7
vector-search7
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
facebookresearch/faiss
Mar 2022 - Sep 2022
A library for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:21 reviews, 23 commits, 124 PRs in 6 months
Contributions summary:Alex's commits focus on optimizing the `faiss` library for efficient similarity search, specifically through implementing and improving AVX2 and AVX512 implementations for key functions. Their work includes the creation of AVX2 implementations for `fvec_madd` and improving AVX2 distance computations. They also optimized AVX2 code for IVFPQ scanning and extended AVX2 versions to support polysemous filtering, demonstrating a strong focus on performance improvements in vector similarity search.
k-meansvectorssimilarity-searchmachine-learningsimilarity
milvus-io/milvus
Sep 2023 - Mar 2025
Milvus is a high-performance, cloud-native vector database built for scalable vector ANN search
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Performance Engineer
Back-end Developer & Performance EngineerContributions:16 reviews, 19 PRs, 143 comments in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Alex primarily focused on improving the performance and stability of the Milvus vector database. Their contributions included fixing a temporary file issue in the testing utilities, removing unused code, and optimizing the bitset utilities. They also worked on performance improvements for bitset operations utilizing AVX512 and ARM SVE, demonstrating a focus on low-level optimization for the core functionalities of the database. Furthermore, the user addressed a compilation issue related to GCC-13 and updated the build process for CMake installation across different platforms.
approximate-nearest-neighbor-searchfaisshnswsimilarity-searchvector
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