Speaker: Samuel Luckenbill
Director of Engineering for Search Infrastructure

Talk Summary: Sam Luckenbill will present Earlybird, the core retrieval engine that powers Twitter’s real-time search. Unlike in traditional web search, a real-time search engine must rapidly ingest content and make it instantly searchable. Earlybird achieves this using a single-writer multi-reader indexing algorithm and lock-free data structures. His talk will review classic search data structures and discuss how they were modified in Earlybird to support concurrent reads and writes. He will also cover Twitter’s search architecture and show how it scaled to over 300M users. Finally, Sam will share career advice for students, including a discussion of Twitter’s hiring process and preparation for interviews. Representatives from Twitter will be available after the talk to answer questions, meet with students, and collect resumes.

Bio: Sam Luckenbill (SM ‘02) is a Director of Engineering at Twitter. He received his M.S. in computer science from UCLA in 2009, focusing on automated reasoning and formal verification. After graduating, he joined Twitter, helping the company scale to thousands of employees and hundreds of millions of users. He has held a variety of technical and managerial roles, mostly related to building products that use information retrieval to surface high-quality, personalized content. He is currently working on Omnisearch, a flexible self-serve indexing system that Twitter is using to improve many of its products, including the Home timeline.

Host: Prof. Richard Lethin, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Yale University

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