Qdrant 2025 Conference Interviews

Nov 28, 2025

Guest

Evgeniya (Jenny) Sukhodolskaya

Guest

Join Andrey Vasnetsov, co-founder and CTO of Qdrant, as he shares the journey of building a developer-focused vector database during the pandemic. Slava Dubrov from HubSpot dives into AI Signals, discussing the power of embeddings in contextual recommendations. Marina Ariamnova of SumUp reveals her innovative LLM assistant that rapidly translates natural language to SQL, transforming analytics workflows. Lastly, Evgeniya Sukhodolskaya explores retrieval research and education at Qdrant, touching on the future of AI in developer tooling.

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INSIGHT

Vectors Are Now A Developer Tool

Andrey explains Qdrant combines database-style querying with vector similarity to serve developer workflows, not end users.
Vector search shifted from ML specialists to a standard developer tool that anybody can integrate quickly.

ANECDOTE

Founding Qdrant During Lockdown

Andrey built an early prototype during COVID lockdowns when he had free time and traction on GitHub followed quickly.
That prototype evolved into Qdrant after colleagues and a co-founder helped turn it into an MVP and startup.

INSIGHT

Contextual Recommendations With Embeddings

HubSpot's AI Signals uses embeddings and similarity search to provide context for agents and features like look-alike company search.
They ensure privacy by restricting searches to a user's data and public datasets separately.

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At Qdrant Conference, builders, researchers, and industry practitioners shared how vector search, retrieval infrastructure, and LLM-driven workflows are evolving across developer tooling, AI platforms, analytics teams, and modern search research.

Andrey Vasnetsov (Qdrant) explained how Qdrant was born from the need to combine database-style querying with vector similarity search—something he first built during the COVID lockdowns. He highlighted how vector search has shifted from an ML specialty to a standard developer tool and why hosting an in-person conference matters for gathering honest, real-time feedback from the growing community.

Slava Dubrov (HubSpot) described how his team uses Qdrant to power AI Signals, a platform for embeddings, similarity search, and contextual recommendations that support HubSpot’s AI agents. He shared practical use cases like look-alike company search, reflected on evaluating agentic frameworks, and offered career advice for engineers moving toward technical leadership.

Marina Ariamnova (SumUp) presented her internally built LLM analytics assistant that turns natural-language questions into SQL, executes queries, and returns clean summaries—cutting request times from days to minutes. She discussed balancing analytics and engineering work, learning through real projects, and how LLM tools help analysts scale routine workflows without replacing human expertise.

Evgeniya (Jenny) Sukhodolskaya (Qdrant) discussed the multi-disciplinary nature of DevRel and her focus on retrieval research. She shared her work on sparse neural retrieval, relevance feedback, and hybrid search models that blend lexical precision with semantic understanding—contributing methods like Mini-COIL and shaping Qdrant’s search quality roadmap through end-to-end experimentation and community education.

Speakers

Andrey Vasnetsov

Co-founder & CTO of Qdrant, leading the engineering and platform vision behind a developer-focused vector database and vector-native infrastructure.

Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrey-vasnetsov-75268897/

Slava Dubrov

Technical Lead at HubSpot working on AI Signals—embedding models, similarity search, and context systems for AI agents.

Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/slavadubrov/

Marina Ariamnova

Data Lead at SumUp, managing analytics and financial data workflows while prototyping LLM tools that automate routine analysis.

Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marina-ariamnova/

Evgeniya (Jenny) Sukhodolskaya

Developer Relations Engineer at Qdrant specializing in retrieval research, sparse neural methods, and educational ML content.

Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evgeniya-sukhodolskaya/