Dmitry Kan
Product Director, Search at Vector Podcast
Helsinki, Finland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDmitry Kan is a Product Director and search specialist with a PhD in Computer Science and over a decade leading the design and delivery of large-scale, production search systems. He combines deep research expertise in relevance, query understanding and vector similarity with hands-on engineering experience from startups to enterprise products, driving ML-backed search at companies like AlphaSense, Silo AI, TomTom and now Aiven. As a founder and consultant he has shipped multimodal vector search, ranking QA and speech recognition solutions for international clients while growing feature velocity and operational resilience in distributed systems. He hosts the Vector Podcast and writes about search technologies, translating cutting-edge research into practical product strategy and vendor comparisons that have reached wide audiences. Based in Helsinki, he also teaches LLM and GenAI topics at the University of Helsinki, blending academic rigor with pragmatism—an unusual combo that helps him bridge research, engineering and product teams effectively.
12 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computer Science at Saint Petersburg State UniversityMaster's degree level, Computer Science, Master's degree level, Computer Science at University of Eastern FinlandBachelor's degree level, Applied Mathematics, Bachelor's degree level, Applied Mathematics at North Ossetian State UniversityND, Entrepreneurship/Entrepreneurial Studies, ND, Entrepreneurship/Entrepreneurial Studies at Stanford University
Russian, English, Finnish, Chinese
Stackoverflow
1,420reputation
96kreached
72answers
21questions
lucene
top-5%
solr
top-5%
Github Skills (200)
benchmark10
approximate10
toolbox10
nearest-neighbors10
neighbors10
ux-design10
luke10
gwt10
solr10
elasticsearch-plugin10
topic-modeling10
lucene10
probability10
sentence-embeddings10
java10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
DmitryKey/big-ann
Aug 2021 - Dec 2021
BigANN Experiments of Team Sisu
Contributions:68 commits, 2 PRs, 48 pushes in 4 months
sisuvector-search
insidersolutions/weka-mnb-sentiment-analysis-template-project
Apr 2014 - Nov 2016
Contributions:11 commits, 3 pushes in 2 years 7 months
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