Erik Bernhardsson spent six years at Spotify, where he contributed to the first version of the music recommendation system. After a stint as CTO at Better.com, he’s now working on building new infrastructure tooling for data teams. In this wide-ranging conversation with Tristan & Julia, Erik dives into the nuts and bolts of Spotify’s recommendation algorithm, (paradoxically) why you should rarely need to use ML, and the fundamental infrastructure challenges that drag down the productivity of data teams. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.