Grant Ingersoll — CTO

After a 20+ year career in tech, cofounding a venture-backed company, Lucidworks, writing a top-selling book on natural language processing & search, and working with global corporations as well as hyper-growth startups, I’ve seen (and survived) a lot. That’s why I’ve formed Develomentor LLC, the plug-and-play tech leadership solution, where our team’s experience and expertise go to work for you. "Grant's arrival at Charity Navigator bridged the gap between our departing CTO and the arrival of a new one. We were 3-months away from completely replatforming our website, unifying our two ratings systems, deploying a new CRM, and launching into the 2022 Giving Season. It was hectic. Grant's calm, expertise, and broad knowledge significantly contributed to our success. In addition to mentoring our engineering teams, he successfully interfaced with external technical consultants, kept me and others on the executive team current on progress, and ultimately, with our new CTO, once she joined us, enabled us to have a successful and timely launch. Grant is a terrific technical leader with strong business acumen that any organization could rely upon as their fractional CTO." - Michael Thatcher, CEO of Charity Navigator “Grant has a unique combination of breadth and depth in the search space, from designing a search solution for performance and stability at scale, while also having deep expertise in the internals of the engine, such as text analysis, relevancy tuning, query optimization, and index design. You won’t find a better teacher to provide a solid foundation in the theory as well as how to apply it when building real world search applications” - Tim Potter, Search Engineer @ Apple “Engaging Develomentor was hugely valuable to our team. Grant Ingersoll’s deep expertise and ability to collaborate with our Product and Engineering teams helped focus our project, identify options, and ultimately define a technical strategy that best aligns with the needs of our business and customers” - Nick Burling, VP of Product Management at Nasuni Elevate your company’s tech strategy with fractional C-Level executive services to optimize operations, streamline project workflows, and unlock sustainable growth. Send me a DM to schedule a 1-on-1 consultation or visit our website (link in featured section) to learn more about how we can transform your business vision into an effective tech solution.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a seasoned leader in the SaaS and AI industry with a focus on search technologies.

Location: Charlotte, United States

Experience: 26 yrs 11 mos

Skills

Search
Machine Learning
Public Speaking
Natural Language Processing
Architecture
Product Development
Technology
Data Science
Engineering Management
Support
Java

Career Highlights

Over 20 years of experience in tech leadership.
Cofounder of a successful venture-backed company.
Expert in search, machine learning, and natural language processing.

Work Experience

BlueMark

Fractional Chief Technology Officer (1 yr 6 mos)

Maisha Meds

Board Member (1 yr 6 mos)

bookend.ai

Fractional Chief Technology Officer (6 mos)

Knoetic | CPOHQ

Interim CTO (5 mos)

Best Practice Institute

Fractional CTO (1 yr 7 mos)

Next Street

Fractional CTO (5 mos)

Charity Navigator

Fractional CTO (5 mos)

Delino

Fractional CTO at Delino (10 mos)

Develomentor

Fractional CTO focused on Search, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (4 yrs 3 mos)

Creator and Host (7 yrs 3 mos)

Uplimit

Instructor (4 yrs 5 mos)

Self Employed

On Leave (5 mos)

SearchStax

Advisor (2 yrs)

ClinWiki

Board Member (11 mos)

Wikimedia Foundation

Chief Technology Officer (1 yr 11 mos)

Lucid Imagination

Chief Technology Officer (3 yrs 7 mos)

Member Board of Directors (5 yrs 6 mos)

Chief Technical Officer, SVP of Engineering (3 yrs)

Chief Scientist (1 yr 5 mos)

Principal, Cofounder (3 yrs 9 mos)

Apache Software Foundation

Founder, Mahout Machine Learning Project (18 yrs 2 mos)

Committer on Apache Solr (18 yrs 3 mos)

Member (18 yrs 3 mos)

Lucene PMC Member (18 yrs 11 mos)

Committer on Lucene Java (19 yrs 11 mos)

Independent Contractor

Author, Taming Text and numerous articles (19 yrs 3 mos)

Independent

Public Speaker (20 yrs 3 mos)

Center For Natural Language Processing

Senior Software Engineer (3 yrs 5 mos)

PROMERGENT

Senior Software Engineer (2 yrs 7 mos)

MNIS-TextWise Labs

Senior Systems Engineer (2 yrs 2 mos)

Northeast Parallel Architectures Center

Summer Intern (2 mos)

Education

MS at Syracuse University

BA at Amherst College

at Buffalo High School

Grant Ingersoll

CTO

Charlotte, United States26 yrs 11 mos experience

Most Likely To SwitchHighly Stable

Key Highlights

Over 20 years of experience in tech leadership.
Cofounder of a successful venture-backed company.
Expert in search, machine learning, and natural language processing.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a seasoned leader in the SaaS and AI industry with a focus on search technologies.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

SearchMachine LearningPublic SpeakingNatural Language ProcessingArchitectureProduct DevelopmentTechnologyData ScienceEngineering ManagementSupportJava

Other Skills

technology selectionteam buildingtechnical leadershiptechnical topicsscalabilityclusteringclassificationopen source toolsapplication developmentpeople managementteam managementsearch product developmentresearch and developmenttrainingconfiguration management

About

Experience

26 yrs 11 mos

Total Experience

7 yrs 10 mos

Average Tenure

19 yrs 3 mos

Current Experience

Bluemark

Fractional Chief Technology Officer

Oct 2024 – Present · 1 yr 6 mos

Maisha meds

Board Member

Oct 2024 – Present · 1 yr 6 mos · Charlotte, North Carolina, United States · Remote

Bookend.ai

Fractional Chief Technology Officer

Dec 2023 – Jun 2024 · 6 mos · Charlotte, North Carolina, United States · Remote

CTO focused on architecture, application development and building awareness. Bookend.ai is a generative AI startup focused on making safe, simple AI available throughout the organization.

natural language processingopen source tools

Knoetic | cpohq

Interim CTO

Mar 2023 – Aug 2023 · 5 mos · Charlotte, North Carolina, United States · Remote

Interim/fractional CTO working on people, technology and process for an early stage startup in the HR tech space.

product development

Best practice institute

Fractional CTO

Nov 2022 – Jun 2024 · 1 yr 7 mos · Remote

Fractional CTO focused on building product in the Human Resources tech space.

architectureapplication development

Next street

Fractional CTO

Nov 2022 – Apr 2023 · 5 mos · Remote

Fractional CTO during the transition from the current CTO to the next CTO

Charity navigator

Fractional CTO

Jul 2022 – Dec 2022 · 5 mos · Remote

Working as a fractional CTO (and now advisor) to fill the gap in tech leadership between the prior CTO leaving and the new CTO starting.

Delino

Fractional CTO at Delino

Feb 2022 – Dec 2022 · 10 mos

Fractional CTO for Delino, a smart contracts company incubating within Munich RE using NLP that is focused on empowering entrepreneurs and SMBs to better understand contracts and risk. Focused on leadership, vision, strategy, tech choices, team structures, team processes as it goes to market.

Develomentor

2 roles

Fractional CTO focused on Search, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing

Jan 2022 – Present · 4 yrs 3 mos

As a consulting CTO, architect or lead engineer, I focus on connecting ideas to technology through:
Technology selection and evaluation (greenfield and existing)
Hiring and team building, team culture and team assessment
Establishing budgets and engineering practices across all aspects of development and production
Field-facing technical leadership
Due diligence for investments, acquisitions and mergers
While I have broad general experience leading large teams in complex environments with global reach and large scale like Wikipedia, I most enjoy working in search, machine learning, natural language processing and more broadly the knowledge space. I have broad experience in search using Solr, Elasticsearch and OpenSearch and have worked across multiple use cases in ecommerce, enterprise search and web search.

searchmachine learningnatural language processingtechnology selectionteam buildingtechnical leadership

Creator and Host

Jan 2019 – Present · 7 yrs 3 mos

Creator and host of a podcast and website focused on careers in technology. https://develomentor.com
Available on Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/develomentor/id1480732807 and Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/show/1M5GHRu7pX52CqhoH4ARlM as well as most other podcast platforms.

Uplimit

Instructor

Nov 2021 – Present · 4 yrs 5 mos

Teaching a class on search with machine learning with Daniel Tunkelang

searchmachine learning

Self employed

On Leave

Aug 2021 – Jan 2022 · 5 mos

Taking leave through (at least) January 2022

natural language processing

Searchstax

Advisor

Jul 2021 – Jul 2023 · 2 yrs

people managementtechnology

Clinwiki

Board Member

Jan 2021 – Dec 2021 · 11 mos

Wikimedia foundation

Chief Technology Officer

Sep 2019 – Aug 2021 · 1 yr 11 mos

Led a team of 150 engineers, researchers, data scientists, site reliability engineers, machine learning engineers and managers supporting a top ten global site.

Lucid imagination

5 roles

Chief Technology Officer

Feb 2016 – Sep 2019 · 3 yrs 7 mos

Focused on the three 'C's of being a CTO: customers, conferences and code. During this time period, I built up our research and data science team from scratch, architected our key machine learning and natural language processing capabilities, all while undertaking significant travel to meet with leading prospects and customers.

team managementdata science

Member Board of Directors

Promoted

Jul 2013 – Jan 2019 · 5 yrs 6 mos

machine learningnatural language processing

Chief Technical Officer, SVP of Engineering

Jan 2013 – Jan 2016 · 3 yrs

Grew engineering team from 10 to 50 while launching our next generation search product Lucidworks Fusion

Chief Scientist

Aug 2011 – Jan 2013 · 1 yr 5 mos

Responsible for research and development of next generation search and machine learning applications

engineering managementsearch product development

Principal, Cofounder

Aug 2007 – May 2011 · 3 yrs 9 mos

Lucid Imagination: Offers support, training, value-add software, and consulting for Lucene/Solr.
The team includes Erik Hatcher, Grant Ingersoll, Marc Krellenstein and Yonik Seeley, Mark Miller and Sami Siren.

research and developmentmachine learning

Apache software foundation

5 roles

Founder, Mahout Machine Learning Project

Feb 2008 – Present · 18 yrs 2 mos

Co-creator of Mahout machine learning project. The goal of Mahout is to create scalable, Apache licensed machine learning algorithms in a variety of areas, including, but not limited to: clustering, classification and categorization, feature reduction, summarization, sentiment analysis and graph importance.
http://lucene.apache.org/mahout

machine learningscalabilityclusteringclassification

Committer on Apache Solr

Jan 2008 – Present · 18 yrs 3 mos

Create and review patches, plan changes, do releases.

Member

Jan 2008 – Present · 18 yrs 3 mos

Lucene PMC Member

May 2007 – Present · 18 yrs 11 mos

Responsible for the development and guidance of the Lucene open source search project along with other members of the Project Management Committee

Committer on Lucene Java

May 2006 – Present · 19 yrs 11 mos

Committer on the Apache Lucene Java project.

Independent contractor

Author, Taming Text and numerous articles

Jan 2007 – Present · 19 yrs 3 mos

Taming Text is a book from Manning Publications (published, 1/2013) on open source tools for search and natural language processing. You can learn more at http://lucene.li/taming.
I have also many published articles, including my introduction to Mahout on IBM developerWorks: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-mahout/index.html

Independent

Public Speaker

Jan 2006 – Present · 20 yrs 3 mos

Speaker on a variety of technical topics, including search, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, machine learning and technical career development. Keynote speaker at Berlin Buzzwords, Lucene/Solr Revolution, and Geecon.

public speakingtechnical topics