Michele Sama
About Michele Sama
Michele Sama is the Director of Engineering at Dialpad, where he leads the Search & Assist unit, focusing on developing advanced virtual assistant technologies. He has extensive experience in engineering and data strategy, having held various roles at companies such as SwiftKey, Kare Knowledgeware, and Google.
Current Role at Dialpad
Michele Sama serves as the Director of Engineering at Dialpad, a role he has held since 2021. In this position, he leads the Search & Assist unit, focusing on the development of a virtual assistant powered by generative AI and semantic search. His responsibilities include managing a scalable vector database designed for virtual assistants and overseeing the full stack of a chatbot knowledge management platform. He also facilitates multi-language service enablement and owns a language detection service to ensure high accuracy in conversations.
Previous Experience at SwiftKey
Michele Sama has an extensive background at SwiftKey, where he held multiple positions from 2012 to 2015. He began as a Software Engineer and Test Architect, then progressed to Head of Cloud Services, and later served as Head of Cloud and Data. His work at SwiftKey involved significant contributions to cloud services and data strategy, enhancing the company's capabilities in AI-driven applications.
Career Background in Technology
Michele Sama has a diverse career in technology, with experience in various roles across multiple organizations. He worked as a Junior CTO at TwoCubed S.r.l. for 10 months and held internships at Google as a Software Testing Engineer and Production Engineer. His roles have consistently involved engineering and data strategy, contributing to his expertise in developing AI solutions.
Educational Background
Michele Sama has a strong educational foundation in computer science. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna from 1999 to 2004. He continued his studies at UCL, where he completed a PhD in Computer Science from 2006 to 2010. This academic background has equipped him with the knowledge and skills necessary for his engineering roles.
Innovations and Projects
At Dialpad, Michele Sama is responsible for several innovative projects. He distributes a Vue3 Chatbot SDK for embedding interactive AI-powered chat interfaces and oversees the development of a low latency conversational AI engine. His work includes designing a platform to commoditize the use of large language models (LLMs) and implementing a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) flow using third-party and historical data.