Etienne Dilocker

Etienne Dilocker is Co-Founder and CTO of Weaviate, the open-source AI-native vector database powering semantic search, RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), and agentic AI applications for developers worldwide. In 2019, Etienne and co-founder Bob van Luijt recognized that modern AI—especially large language models—demanded an entirely new infrastructure layer, and built Weaviate to bridge the gap between unstructured data and intelligent applications. As CTO, Etienne leads development of Weaviate's HNSW-based vector search, hybrid retrieval, multi-tenancy, and distributed architecture, optimizing performance from billion-scale e-commerce product catalogs to partitioned email RAG systems serving millions of inboxes. A veteran software engineer with over 15 years of experience in cloud-native, high-performance systems, Etienne specializes in Golang, database development, and SRE-driven observability, previously working as a freelance architect and tech lead across retail, finance, and media. He contributed to the widely-used ANN Benchmarks project, integrating and tuning Weaviate's approximate nearest neighbor implementation with hands-on parameter optimization. Based in Mannheim, Germany, Etienne also runs Dilocker Software Engineering, bringing startup leadership and deep systems expertise to every layer of Weaviate—from Kubernetes operators to query optimization. His vision: transform AI from model-centric MLOps to developer-first AI Engineering, where every engineer can build stateful, memory-powered intelligent applications.