Relationships should be the product
Himanshu Singh has built knowledge graphs three times at three very different scales: a politics subgraph inside Microsoft's Satori, a zero-to-one product graph at eBay, and now Netflix's Entertainment Knowledge Graph, where he leads engineering. The line he keeps returning to is that relationships should be the product. Node count is not the measure, and a graph that duplicates what already lives in your CRM or your warehouse is mostly cost. He is notably relaxed about technology choice, pointing out that Netflix built its own real-time graph abstraction over a key-value store because no native graph database could absorb their write volume. What he is not relaxed about is data quality at the point of entry, because once bad data is in a graph and connected to everything else, undoing it is very hard.
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Himanshu Singh
Leads engineering on Netflix's Entertainment Knowledge Graph, having previously built and scaled knowledge graphs at eBay and on Microsoft Bing's Satori. His career has centred on one problem: turning low-quality, scattered information into cohesive, connected, high-quality knowledge. He presented at the Knowledge Graph Conference on scaling Netflix's Entertainment Knowledge Graph with LLMs.
What we'll cover
- 01Three graphs, three scales: a politics domain inside Microsoft's Satori, building from zero at eBay, and the Entertainment Knowledge Graph at Netflix.
- 02What was actually common across a general web knowledge base, an e-commerce product graph and an entertainment catalogue, once you take scale out of the comparison.
- 03Why meaning lives in the relationships rather than the node count, and how to explain that to a business that measures things by size.
- 04Federate, don't duplicate: keeping your CRM or ERP as the system of record and reaching into it, instead of copying it into the graph and inheriting the bloat.
- 05Graph databases evaluated over years and at real scale, what worked, what tapped out, and why the storage choice matters less than people assume.
- 06The reliability argument: moving the human from downstream of the output to upstream of the knowledge asset, and what that looks like operationally at Netflix's scale.
- 07Feedback loops that amount to continuous knowledge-graph auditing, and the case for an observability layer over knowledge creation rather than model output.
- 08Property graph, triple store, or neither, and whether a knowledge graph is meaningfully different from a graph database.
- 09Whether knowledge graphs changed at all after transformers, or whether only the tooling around them did.
- 10His one piece of advice for teams reaching for a graph to fix agent reliability: start from the problem and the data, not the database.
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