Erik Bernhardsson
Founder and CEO of Modal; creator of the open-source Annoy library and co-creator of Luigi at Spotify
Erik Bernhardsson is the founder and CEO of Modal, a cloud platform for running data, AI and machine learning applications on its own serverless infrastructure. Before Modal, Bernhardsson ran the technology team at Better.com from 2015 to 2021 and spent six years at Spotify, where Bernhardsson built the first version of its music recommendation system and created the open-source Annoy library and, with Elias Freider, the Luigi workflow engine.13468
Career
Bernhardsson spent six years at Spotify, first managing its Analytics team and then building up and managing the machine learning team. Bernhardsson built the first version of Spotify's music recommendations, including features such as Related Artists, Radio and Discover Weekly.1
From February 2015 to January 2021, Bernhardsson ran the technology team at Better.com, a mortgage company. Bernhardsson then founded Modal with Akshat Bubna; Modal's blog lists Bernhardsson as CEO and co-founder, and the company describes building its own file system, container runtime, scheduler and image builder to make cloud development faster.134
Open-source work and writing
At Spotify, Bernhardsson open-sourced Annoy, a library for approximate nearest neighbor search that Spotify used to find similar users and items for music recommendations, and co-created Luigi, a workflow engine for batch pipelines. Bernhardsson writes a blog, has given talks on approximate nearest neighbors, Luigi and machine learning for music recommendations, and co-organizes the NYC Machine Learning meetup.681
In May 2026 Bernhardsson co-authored, with Charles Frye, Jonathon Belotti and Akshat Bubna, Modal's engineering post on how the company achieved serverless GPUs, covering idle GPU buffers, a custom filesystem for lazily loading container images, and related techniques.5
Work
Annoy (external site: github.com)Open-source code
Built Annoy, a C++/Python library for approximate nearest neighbor search in high-dimensional spaces, during a Spotify hack week; Bernhardsson is the package's listed author on PyPI.671
Luigi (external site: github.com)Open-source code
Built Luigi, a Python workflow engine for task scheduling and dependency resolution, at Spotify mainly with Elias Freider; it was open-sourced in late 2012.81
Career timeline
2012
Luigi, built at Spotify mainly by Bernhardsson and Elias Freider, was open-sourced.8
Mar 24, 2014
Published the first release of Annoy on PyPI.7
Feb 2015
Began running the technology team at Better.com.1
Jan 2021
Left Better.com after six years leading its technology team.1
May 12, 2026
Co-authored Modal's engineering post on achieving serverless GPUs.5
Other documented roles
Roles the sources document but that are not confirmed as current.
Related people
More sourced profiles at the same organization, in the same field, or from the same school.
- Akshat BubnaAlso at Modal
- 0xSeroInference and serving
- Thomas J. FanAlso at Modal
- Adrien GallouëtInference and serving
- Aldehir RojasInference and serving
- Dane KnechtInference and serving
- Daniel BeveniusInference and serving
- Davide EynardInference and serving
- Erik GafniDeveloper tools
- Jeffrey MorganInference and serving
- Julien SimonInference and serving
- Luis Héctor ChávezDeveloper tools
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