Profile
Background
David Pilato discovered the Elasticsearch project in 2011. He contributed to it and built open source plugins for the engine before joining Elastic in 2013. He first worked on the Elasticsearch codebase, mainly its plugins, then joined the Developer Relations team.
He is the author of FSCrawler, an open source project that indexes documents (PDFs, office files and other formats) into Elasticsearch using Apache Tika.
He created and still runs ElasticFR, Elastic’s French-speaking user group, which has passed its hundredth meetup. A frequent speaker, he has given close to 600 talks in some thirty countries, at conferences, user groups and companies.
Perspective
Digital and GenAI credentials
David Pilato works on search as the foundation of generative AI: on Elasticsearch Labs, he published an introduction to LangChain4j and a guide to building a RAG application in Java with Elasticsearch as the embedding store. In 2026, he presented “Give your coding agent an (Elastic) memory” and was the guest of the first episode of the Elasticast podcast, on how search became the foundation of generative AI.