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 (https://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? Email natalie@jonkrohn.com 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