Alexis Nicolas Schlomer

Welcome! I’m Alexis, a Software Engineer at Databricks working on Query Processing in Photon. I hold an MS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from EPFL.

My interests lie in databases, networks, and systems engineering. I invented Panorama, a system that accelerates vector search (ANNS) by orders of magnitude (2–30×). Panorama is now part of Faiss, the open-source vector search library developed by Meta AI. Prior to joining Databricks, I was a systems programmer for the CMU Database Group and the tech lead of optd, an open-source query optimizer designed to make query optimization more principled and efficient.

Before my graduate studies, I was born and raised in northern Belgium, moving to southern Switzerland at age 11, where I later completed my undergraduate education.