Join us for a meetup in Oakland on Wednesday, November 8! The Elastic Washington DC user group organizer (Salar Rahmanian)  is in town and will be guest organizing this meetup. Thank you to Snagajob for providing the venue, food & beverage, and content for the evening. 

Agenda: 

5:30pm: Doors open, there will be some time to mingle. Food & beverages will be provided. 

6:30pm: Presentation begins with Q&A: Search at Snagajob by Jason Kowalewski

9:00pm: Doors close.

Search at Snagajob

Here at snagajob we have an interesting search and recommendations problem: how to match the right workers in a fast-paced hourly labor market with the right employers. I'll take you through the evolution of the search platform here at snagajob, from the deterministic approach of hand tuned search relevance to our new platform which uses a machine learned ranking (Learning to Rank) to match workers and employers. We will discuss how we built a learning to rank plugin for Elasticsearch and the real-world problems we encountered bringing such a system to production. 

Jason Kowalewski, Senior Director of Engineering at Snagajob — The largest marketplace for hourly work in the US — leads the effort to build a new search and recommendation platform that will better match the right workers with the right employers. The project makes extensive use of elasticsearch, learning to rank, natural language processing, and other machine learning techniques. Before his time at Snagajob, Kowalewski was an active player in the Washington DC startup scene, creating and working with companies to solve problems using predictive analytics, data management platforms and other advertising technology solutions.