Milvus Meetup - Paris

​Wed 7 Oct 2026 · 18:00–22:00 CEST

​Whether you’re a seasoned ML engineer, a new AI product owner or simply curious about vector search, this meetup will cover the fundamentals through to how AI-native companies manage vector search at scale. Three talks from experts in the industry and a chance to network with like-minded folks.

​Hosted at Criteo's Paris office, co-organised with the Criteo engineering team. Talks are in English.

​What you’ll hear about

• ​What a vector index is really doing, and why recall drops where it does

• ​Agentic retrieval vs. a good index: the honest trade-offs in latency, cost, and quality

• ​Scaling a production index: the design decisions you only discover after launch

• ​Embeddings, chunking, and the latest techniques to improve quality while reducing cost

​Agenda

• ​18:00 — Doors open. Check-in. Welcome drinks and snacks.

• ​18:30 — Opening: Criteo welcome + Milvus community intro

• ​18:40

  • ​Talk：Visualising Vector Search: From Zero to Hero in Vector Search Algorithms

  • ​Speaker: Simon Hearne, Solutions Architect, Milvus/Zilliz

• ​19:20

  • ​Talk: From Product Need to Distributed Vector Search: Lessons from a Criteo Use Case

  • ​Speaker:

    • ​Mehdi Sebbar, Staff ML Engineer, AI for Agentic Commerce (AIAC), Criteo

    • ​Erenus Dermanci, Site Reliability Engineer, R&D Platform, Criteo

  • ​Outline: The product use case behind it, why it calls for a distributed vector database, the pain points hit along the way, and the options for solving them.

• ​20:00

  • ​Talk: RAG Design Patterns: Product Indexing at Scale

  • ​Speaker:

    • ​Mohamed Ali Fathallah, Senior Machine learning engineer, Gorgias

    • ​Othmane Jebbari, Machine learning engineer, Gorgias

  • ​Outline: How Gorgias arrived at its current design, and how scalability pressures shaped those choices over two years.

• ​20:30 — Networking, drinks & swag

• ​22:00 — Close

​Who this is for

• ​Engineers building RAG, semantic search or recommendations in production

• ​Data and platform architects, search team tech leads

• ​CTOs and early technical teams at AI startups

• ​Anyone deciding between an agentic pipeline and a plain index

​Before you come

​Criteo requires all attendee names in advance for building security. Registration closes 7 October and late arrivals at the venue after 7PM will not be admitted due to security reasons. Please bring photo ID. Detailed address, entrance and metro directions go out by email once your registration is confirmed. Space is limited, register early.