AJ Roetker

CTO

AJ is Antfly's CTO and resident mad scientist. When they're not cooking up the next thing in the lab, they're running parkour lines or captaining their soccer team, Stanky Panky.

Posts

September 12, 2026Research

A Search-and-Inference Database from Scratch in Pure Zig

Why we rewrote Antfly's Go engine in Zig while the startup was still early: first principles, caring about the model instead of the embeddings, TigerBeetle-style simulation testing, and what the rewrite made possible.

April 17, 2026Research

Building a Distributed Search Engine in Pure Go

How we built the Antfly engine in Go: Multi-Raft consensus, SIMD-accelerated vectors, and local ML inference, all in one static binary.