Michele Riva

Michele Riva

I’m a software engineer and entrepreneur based in San Francisco, California. I'm currently leading the engineering team at Orama, which I co-founded in 2023 with Issac Roth (CEO) and Angela Angelini (CDO).

For over a decade, I've worked with startups and large companies in both product development and consultancy roles, gleaning insights from both worlds.

In 2022, I authored "Real-World Next.js," published by Packt Publishing. You can find it on Amazon. The book draws inspiration from my work on Paramount's platform team, where I designed and implemented a high-performance, multitenant Node.js application server. This server powered over 250 streaming websites from a single, medium EC2 instance, handling up to 14,000 requests per second, with Next.js serving the front-end.

As a Staff Software Engineer at Nearform, I designed and built Orama - an incredibly fast and portable full-text and vector search engine. It's written entirely in TypeScript without any external dependencies.

In 2023, I founded a company based on Orama. Today, it powers millions of monthly search requests on major websites including nodejs.org and docs.deno.com, among others.

Over the past few years, I've spoken at approximately a hundred international conferences and meetups, covering topics such as software architecture, computer science, and more.


Patents

US11829426B1 - Issued
Operating a distributed search index in a content delivery network
A facility for distributing a search index for a corpus of documents is described. The facility accesses multiple search index segments collectively making up the search index. Each of the segments is executable to traverse a...
US20250322019A1 - Issued
Operating in a content delivery network a distributed search index based on an automatically-selected set of documents properties
A facility is described for automatically selecting document properties to be included in an index on a corpus of documents. In some cases, the facility performs this automatic selection by subjecting a list of the document p...
US20250225170A1 - Issued
Operating in a content delivery network a distributed search index for performing vector search
An index shard data structure that is part of a search index is described. The data structure includes an executable routine that takes as an argument a semantic meaning representation of a query, embeds list of mappings from...

In the media


Honors and Awards