Philip Adams
Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPhilip Adams is a software engineer with eight years of experience building high-performance retrieval and perception systems, most recently joining Waymo after five years on Microsoft's retrieval team. He has deep backend expertise in large-scale vector search and index engineering, contributing notable improvements to Microsoft’s SPTAG ANN library including Product Quantization support, SSD integration, and performance optimizations. Philip pairs academic rigor from a University of Chicago MS/BS in CS and Math with practical production experience across Bing, Maps geospatial indexing, and perception pipelines. Based in Seattle, he focuses on scalable systems, low-level optimizations, and cleanups that yield measurable runtime and storage gains—work that often bridges research-grade algorithms and production constraints.
8 years of coding experience
Master of Science - MS, Computer Science, Master of Science - MS, Computer Science at University of Chicago
Github Skills (11)
vector-search10
approximate-nearest-neighbor-search10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
optimization9
optimisation9
numerical-optimization9
algorithm9
code-optimization9
algorithms9
memory-management8
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
microsoft/SPTAG
Aug 2021 - Oct 2022
A distributed approximate nearest neighborhood search (ANN) library which provides a high quality vector index build, search and distributed online serving toolkits for large scale vector search scenario.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:88 reviews, 81 commits, 44 PRs in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Philip primarily contributed to the `microsoft/sptag` repository by adding support for PQ (Product Quantization) for memory and SSD storage, which included merging code from the SSD branch and updating documentation. The user also made changes related to index file handling, fixing build issues, and improving performance of SDC (Similarity Distance Calculation). Furthermore, the commits involved optimization and code cleanup, such as removing unused code and simplifying the quantizer.
approximate-nearest-neighbor-searchsimilarity-searchkd-treeneighborhoodtoolkits
PhilipBAdams/SPTAG
Aug 2021 - Mar 2023
A distributed approximate nearest neighborhood search (ANN) library which provides a high quality vector index build, search and distributed online serving toolkits for large scale vector search scenario.
Contributions:123 pushes, 11 branches in 1 year 6 months
approximate-nearest-neighbor-searchsimilarity-searchneighborhoodtoolkitsvector
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