Kevin Butler is a Senior Search and AI Engineer at KMW Technology, where he helps clients build production-grade search and agentic AI systems. He previously built search systems at Pinecone and Lucidworks.

His work centers on enterprise search, relevance engineering, and the intersection of LLMs with retrieval — from hybrid lexical/semantic pipelines to LangGraph-orchestrated agent workflows. Before consulting, Kevin spent 2.5 years as an early employee at Pinecone, where he developed a deep, hands-on foundation in production vector databases. He's a contributor to Lucille, an open-source Java ETL pipeline targeting Solr, OpenSearch, and Elasticsearch, and has years of experience tuning relevance for large-scale search systems. He recently presented "Adaptive Relevance with Agentic Search" at Haystack US 2026 — a layered lexical, semantic, hybrid, and reranker architecture benchmarked on the ESCI dataset — and spoke at the Optimized AI Conference in 2025. He writes regularly on agentic development workflows and AI-assisted engineering.

Trey Grainger is lead author of the book AI-Powered Search (Manning 2025) and founder of Searchkernel, a software consultancy building the next generation of AI-powered search. He also serves as a technical advisor at OpenSource Connections.

He previously served as CTO of Presearch, a decentralized web search engine, and as Chief Algorithms Officer and SVP of Engineering at Lucidworks, a search company whose technology powers hundreds of the world’s leading organizations. Trey is also co-author of the book Solr in Action (Manning 2014), as well as over a dozen other publications including books, journals, and research papers. Trey has 18 years of experience in search and data science focused on building self-learning search platforms integrating the most successful AI Search techniques.

Trey teaches AI Search in the course AI-Powered Search: Modern Retrieval for Humans & Agents with Doug Turnbull.