Michelin thinking. Bistro delivery.

Nearly two decades in search, AI, and open source.

Atita Arora is a hands-on engineering and AI leader who has been building information retrieval systems since 2007 — from Solr and Lucene, through the full arc of open-source search, into modern vector databases, hybrid retrieval, RAG, and multi-agent systems.

Most recently she was Director of AI at Voyager Search (2025–2026), where she owned the AI and retrieval technical direction and led the engineering team building a multimodal, multi-agent knowledge assistant — combining OCR, vision-language models and multi-agent orchestration for secure, air-gapped enterprise retrieval. She founded Bistro Innovation Labs in 2025 and now leads it full-time.

Earlier she was AI Solutions Architect at Qdrant (2023–2024), the open-source vector database, and a Search Relevance Consultant at OpenSource Connections (2022–2023), working across e-commerce, enterprise and medical search with Solr, OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Vespa and Apache OpenNLP — and contributing to Chorus and Quepid. Before that she led search and backend teams at the Mytoys/Otto Group, Idealo and others across an 18-year career.

She is a Committer and PMC member of Apache OpenNLP (2023–present), sits on the Berlin Buzzwords 2026 Program Committee, and is Co-Lead of Women of Search (member since 2022), an international community championing women in the search and relevance field through mentorship and knowledge sharing. Since 2025 she has also worked as a leadership coach.

She speaks internationally at the AI Engineer World's Fair, Berlin Buzzwords, ApacheCon, Haystack and the Vector Podcast, on RAG, vector search, agentic AI and AI productisation.

Her focus areas: vector search, RAG evaluation, relevance engineering, multi-agent systems, multimodal retrieval, and AI-readiness assessments for organisations moving from proof-of-concept to production.