Erik Bernhardsson

CEO at Modal

New York, New York

2021

Chief Executive Officer
2021
I'm working on a set of amazing tools and infra for data teams. The team is currently 35 incredibly smart people mostly based in NYC but with some in Stockholm and SF too.

2015 - 2021

Chief Technology Officer
2015 - 2021
I ran the technology team. Some things I did: - Grew the tech team from 1 to 300 - Interviewed 2,000+ candidates - Promoted a number of engineers to managers and directors - Set up a career ladder, salary review system, onboarding checklist, and a ton of other similar things - Was a part of raising money, presenting to investors and board members - Ran the product team for a while and hired 10 product managers - Contributed a significant amount to the technology, especially on the data/ML side. Better was a roller coaster with lots of ups and downs. Recent interest rate hikes have been rough for Better, but they went public in August 2023, and I'm long-term bullish.

2011 - 2015

Engineering Manager
2011 - 2015
Built up the Discovery team at Spotify. I built a music recommender system from scratch using large scale machine learning algorithms and then built up a team of about 20 people to help me launch a number of features leveraging it, including data engineering, machine learning, backend, and frontend (iOS/JS). I ended up releasing a couple of open source projects at Spotify, including Luigi, a workflow management tool (used by Bitly, Foursquare, Capital One, etc), as well as Annoy, a library for high dimensional nearest neighbor search used by many companies (Instacart etc).

2011 - 2011

Associate, High Frequency Trading
2011 - 2011
Wrote mainly C++ for high frequency trading.

2008 - 2011

Engineering Manager
2009 - 2011
Inofficially: I skunkworked on the music recommendation system (a continuation of my internship) My day job: I proposed and built up the Analytics team in the Stockholm office, responsible for collecting, aggregating and making sense out of all the data at Spotify. Everything from ad-hoc insights to A/B testing, visualization, ad optimization, etc. Also made a bunch of slides for investors!
Software Engineer Intern
2008 - 2008
During 2008 I wrote my master's thesis on systems for doing automatic music recommendation, later awarded master's thesis of the year (by Naturvetarna - a Swedish trade union).

2007 - 2007

Intern Developer
2007 - 2007
Working on parallelizing pricing of financial instruments.

2006 - 2007

Intern Software Engineer
2006 - 2007
Writing embedded code for Google's hardware infrastructure.

2005 - 2006