The Search Pioneers
Stuart and Russ Cam, are a "twin-cam engine" powering our consulting firm, harnessing their combined expertise in search, AI, and cybersecurity to drive innovation for customers.
Stuart Cam
Stuart has 25 years consulting experience, with the last decade spent in search and AI.
His recent open-source contributions have advanced the vector storage capabilities of Microsoft's Semantic Kernel AI project. He has also provided expert guidance to AI startups on their vector storage implementations and designed search systems capable of handling billions of documents.
As the Search Platform Lead at Canva, Stuart developed a new search pipeline (Part one and part two blog posts) that efficiently managed millions of active users and processed tens of thousands of queries per second.
During his tenure at Elastic, he played a crucial role in enhancing the Microsoft ecosystem, contributing to its substantial growth in downloads and adoption.
Stuart's strategic and practical approach to technology ensures that systems are not only innovative but also secure and high-performing.
Russ Cam
Russ has accumulated over a decade of expertise in search, AI, and observability, in a career spanning nearly two decades.
During his recent role as a Staff Engineer at Canva, he led the strategic shift of search technologies from Solr to Elasticsearch and OpenSearch, dramatically enhancing the platform's search capabilities. In addition, he led the integration of Vector search as a platform capability for teams to experiment with models and strategies, and productionize their outcomes.
Previously, at Elastic, he was crucial in developing and refining .NET Application Performance Monitoring (APM) agents and .NET and Rust clients, as well as facilitating the adoption of Elastic on Microsoft Azure.
Beyond his technical skills, he is also a committed educator, having initiated knowledge-sharing initiatives that have significantly contributed to the evolution of search technology. He also served as a technical reviewer for the authoritative book Relevant Search published by Manning Publications.