What 2025 taught me as a Head of Engineering
Every year, I try to answer a simple question: Did Engineering make the company stronger? Not “did we ship features?”, but “did what we built make users more successful, and make the business more resilient?”
In 2025, impact became more visible. We improved monetization, built more enterprise trust, made scalability central, and moved AI Search closer to production reality. And we did it while staying true to what makes Meilisearch special: open-source, and the community around it.
This is my retrospective of 2025, from a Head of Engineering perspective, focused on what created lasting value.
1) Pricing is an engineering topic
Pricing is often treated as a “business” subject. In 2025, it became a very concrete engineering lever.
As anyone who has ever built billing, subscriptions, or payments knows: pricing is not something you can “just change”. It is deeply tied to your product, your systems, your data, and your ability to run safe iterations.
In 2025, we rolled out a new pricing model in Meilisearch Cloud early in the year. Revenue increased fast in Q1, which validated the direction. But most of that uplift came from usage-based revenue, which is powerful and also volatile. In the second half of the year, growth slowed and the limits became more visible. We had to react!
Later in the year, we rolled out resource-based plans in our Cloud offering. It performed better, because it scales more predictably and aligns more directly with customer value.
What I take from this is not “usage-based pricing is bad”. It’s that pricing should evolve with customers. People want to adjust their plan as they grow, as their usage changes, and as their constraints change. They want something they can customize.
And for that, we had to adapt parts of our stack and our codebase so we can evolve faster, test ideas safely, and support more flexible plans. 2025 was the year where we got ready for what comes next.
That’s where Meilisearch is heading in 2026: a more flexible pricing model, designed to adapt to different customers instead of expecting all customers to fit the same shape. And more than ever, we’re technically ready to iterate.
2) Enterprise readiness is built with proof
Enterprise growth is not only about features. It’s about trust, proof, and reducing friction.
In 2025, one of the clearest impact areas was security maturity. We achieved and completed SOC2 Type 2. Beyond the certification, it improved our internal practices and reduced procurement friction for bigger accounts.
We also leaned more into design partner collaborations. This approach helped us build closer to real enterprise constraints. In 2025, we worked with customers to improve our AI capabilities, deploy our new sharding system, release a new advanced geo-search feature, and revamp our analytics dashboard. This is expensive in terms of engineering bandwidth, but it yields high-quality outcomes. It shortens feedback loops and increases credibility.
We want to keep making this bet in 2026: Building with enterprise customers is one of the fastest ways to deliver real value. But it only works if we protect our bandwidth. The challenge is to stay close to enterprise needs without letting them redefine everything we do.
3) Scaling work became a business enabler
Performance has always been at the core of Meilisearch. We are building search that feels instant. But fast search has a hidden cost: indexing.
To deliver great query speed, we need to ingest and index documents efficiently. And indexing is hard. It consumes resources, it requires deep engine work, and it becomes more challenging as datasets grow and workloads evolve.
Since the beginning of Meilisearch, indexing has been one of our hardest daily challenges. It was always there, always important, but for a long time, it also felt like something we could postpone, or treat as a secondary priority. We had to change that.
In mid-2025, I led a team reorganization to create a dedicated team focused entirely on scalability. Instead of treating scale as a background constraint, we made it a daily priority. That’s when scalability stopped being a “future problem”. It became a business capability, and a central topic for Meilisearch.
In the last six months of the year, we made more progress than ever. The most visible milestone was the implementation of the Meilisearch sharding system. It moved quickly from delivery to production proof, and it was used in production by our largest customer. It directly enabled the deal and validated the strategy of investing in scale.
One sentence from my notes captures the year well: hard problems require dedicated focus.
4) AI Search: building for what comes next
Search is evolving fast. AI is evolving even faster. One of the bets we made in 2025 was to keep Meilisearch future-proof. Not by chasing AI trends, but by building solid foundations, so customers can rely on us as new capabilities become standard.
In 2025, we made Meilisearch’s hybrid and semantic search even more production-ready. These features are particularly appreciated by our users, and we focused on making them easier to adopt, including by making them available out of the box in our Cloud offering.
We also kept pushing innovation forward:
we shipped multimodal search, unlocking image search use cases
we introduced a chat route, laying early foundations for RAG
These newer capabilities come with a different kind of challenge: accessibility. The features are there, and we have the internal expertise to make them even better. But putting them in the hands of everyone is a different problem. It requires clearer guidance, simpler setup, and a smoother path from “I want this” to “it works”.
That is one of our main challenges for 2026: making our AI capabilities not only powerful, but easy to use.
5) Execution: shipping faster, increasing team leverage
I used to think execution was mostly about process and tooling. In 2025, I was reminded that it starts with something more fundamental: how teams are structured.
In mid-2025, we made one of the biggest changes of the year: we reorganized the engineering team. We moved from teams organized around parts of the codebase to teams organized around objectives.
We created:
a Scale team, dedicated to product scalability, to support long-term business growth
an Experience team, focused on user experience, including support
This shift had a direct impact. In 2025, the Experience team helped us improve the quality of our support significantly. The Scale team also became a key driver of our progress on scalability, as I mentioned earlier.
In each team, we made sure all the technical skills were present, so the team could stay autonomous across the whole delivery chain, from shaping an idea to shipping it to production. This reduced friction a lot, because teams did not need to “wait for someone else” to move forward.
Once we made that change, it became easier to reconsider everything. Step by step, we started improving delivery speed and reducing friction. One of the most impactful changes was moving our engine release cycle from every 8 weeks to weekly releases, which is definitely not trivial for open-source software.
This is what we aim to maintain in 2026: a mindset of constant reconsideration, iteration, and improvement. It was one of the key drivers behind our execution progress in 2025, and it needs to stay part of how we operate.
6) The community behind Meilisearch
Meilisearch is open-source, and that changes everything. It shapes how we build, how we communicate, and how we learn. It creates a different relationship with users: people don’t just use the product, they contribute to it.
As a Head of Engineering, I see the community as a long-term advantage because it compounds:
It helps validate what matters early
It raises quality standards
It strengthens trust through transparency
It expands adoption beyond what a team can reach alone
And this is not just a feeling. In 2025, contributions from external contributors grew again, with around 450 PRs merged. On average, 31% of the PRs merged across our open-source repositories were opened by external contributors.
In a year where we focused heavily on scale, enterprise readiness, and monetization, the community remained one of the strongest anchors.
What I’m taking into 2026
2025 made our impact more visible: we improved monetization foundations, strengthened enterprise trust, made scalability central, and pushed AI Search forward while keeping Meilisearch future-proof. We also improved execution by reorganizing teams around objectives and autonomy.
What I take into 2026 is simple: keep building for real customer needs, keep iterating on how we ship, and keep investing in the foundations that make Meilisearch scale. Because the goal is not only to move fast. It’s to build something customers can grow with.
