Jörg Viechtbauer is Lead Software Architect at QAware. Search is his calling: for nearly 25 years – ever since his diploma thesis at RWTH Aachen on probabilistic retrieval in a latent space – information retrieval has been the one constant in his career. Since July 2020 he is at QAware, currently part of the team behind a Solr-based platform that powers BMW's aftersales workshops worldwide and answers billions of queries per year. Jörg knows the Lucene/Solr stack down to the bits-and-bytes level, and increasingly works at the intersection of search and AI: passage retrieval, RAG, MCP. He enjoys sharing the craft – architecture, search, and lately AI prompt tuning. His architectural credo follows Saint-Exupéry: perfection is reached not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. Good architecture, he believes, can be explained in three or four sentences. What drives Jörg is relevance: the software he builds matters to real people – the mechanics who keep cars running, and the commuters, families, and ambulance crews who depend on them.
