Jon Krohn speaks with Erik Bernhardsson, the man who invented Spotify’s original music recommendation system. They address the different ways to interview a data science candidate, how to deploy a data model into the cloud, and the approach he took that made Spotify go from a digital music startup to an AI-driven streaming giant.

This episode is brought to you by Datalore (datalore.online/SDS), the collaborative data science platform, by Zencastr (zen.ai/sds), the easiest way to make high-quality podcasts, and by Bunch (superdatascience.com/bunch), the AI driven leadership coach. Interested in sponsoring a SuperDataScience Podcast episode? Visit JonKrohn.com/podcast for sponsorship information.

In this episode you will learn:
• The data problem that Erik’s company Modal Labs solves [04:32]
• Erik’s prolific blogging career [09:15]
• Opportunities for making data teams more efficient and productive [14:42]
• Erik’s views on interviewing data scientists and software developers [20:18]
• Erik’s tips and tricks for data science interviewees [31:35]
• How Erik built Spotify’s original music recommendation system [38:58]
• Applying vectors to other tools, and opportunities for working with vectors [47:45]
• Using Annoy to search across vectors [50:57]
• Building Python module Luigi for Spotify [55:20]
• The tools that Erik loves to work with [1:06:23]

Additional materials: www.superdatascience.com/619