Etienne Dilocker

Etienne Dilocker is co-founder and chief technology officer of Weaviate, the company behind the open-source Weaviate vector database. He built it with chief executive Bob van Luijt, whom he met while both worked at a European enterprise company.

Freelancing as a Full-Stack Engineer

Before Weaviate he worked as a freelance software engineer focused on fast, reliable software that scales, according to his FOSDEM 2023 speaker profile. He joined new and established teams as a full-stack engineer or tech lead to help them ship better applications faster, and led engineering teams building cloud-native applications for multinational companies in finance, retail and wholesale, his AI Conference profile says.

Rewriting the Prototype in Go

Weaviate began at SeMI Technologies, the company that later took the product's name. Dilocker and van Luijt rewrote an early Node.js prototype in Go, bet on natural language processing before most people called it AI, and adopted the HNSW search algorithm while it was still a niche paper, they recalled on the Weaviate Podcast in 2026. They raised a $1.2 million seed round from Zeta during COVID, so Weaviate had a working product when ChatGPT and retrieval-augmented generation took off. He has described the effort in a FOSDEM talk titled "Our Mad Journey of Building a Vector Database in Go."

Running a Slop Pass on Every Pull Request

Dilocker calls AI coding one of his biggest passions and says he is very vocal about using AI coding agents. Weaviate runs a dedicated "slop pass" over every pull request to strip out the stock phrases that make AI-written code and text look the same.

The use of AI that excites him most is riding in self-driving cars. "Go sit in a Waymo and you see AI is very, very real," he said.