2026 April Meetup ; Antfly
AJ Roetker spent over a decade in Portland building distributed systems at Puppet, Lytics, and Contentstack, working on everything from storage engines and enterprise deployment tooling to cloud-native data pipelines.
Now AJ is building Antfly, a distributed multimodal database that combines full-text and vector search with built-in ML inference via Termite, our local model server for embedding, reranking, chunking, OCR, NER, transcription, and more.
This talk covers what AJ's learned building a context layer for AI agents: why retrieval needs to go beyond simple vector lookup, how a database that understands its own data changes what agents can do, and the practical challenges of making enterprise knowledge truly available to AI. Not just stored, but searchable, enriched, and ready to act and iterate on.
Schedule:
5:00 - 5:30: Snacks and networking
5:30 - 6:30: Presentations
6:30 - 7:00: Wrap up and networking
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