Today's guest is mighty Erik Bernhardsson — creator of Spotify's music recommender, prolific open-source developer, world-leading technical blogger, and now model-deployment-tool entrepreneur via Modal Labs.

Erik:
• Is the Founder and CEO of Modal Labs, a startup building innovative tools and infrastructure for data teams.
• Previously was CTO of the real estate startup Better, where he grew the engineering team from the size of 1 — himself — to 300 people.
• Was also previously an Engineering Manager at Spotify, where he created their now-ubiquitous music-recommendation algorithm.
• Is a prolific open-sourcer, having created the popular Luigi and Annoy libraries, among several others.
• Is an industry-leading blogger with posts that frequently feature on the front page of Hacker News.

Today’s episode gets deep into the weeds at points, so it will be particularly appealing to practicing data scientists, ML engineers, and the like, but much of the fascinating, wide-ranging conversation in this episode will appeal to any curious listener.

In this episode, Erik details:
• How the Spotify music recommender he built works so well at scale.
•The litany of new data science and engineering tools he’s excited about and thinks you should be excited about too.
•What open-source library he would develop next.
•Why he founded his Modal and how their tools empower data teams.
• Having interviewed more than 2000 candidates for engineering roles, his top tips both for succeeding as an interviewer and as an interviewee.

The SuperDataScience show's available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.