creators

Matei Zaharia: Spark creator, Databricks CTO

Matei Zaharia started Apache Spark at Berkeley, co-founded Databricks and is its CTO. He teaches EECS at UC Berkeley and won the 2025 ACM Prize in Computing.

Matei Zaharia is a Romanian-Canadian computer scientist and the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Databricks. He took a BMath at Waterloo in 2007, with a double major in computer science and combinatorics & optimization, and started the Apache Spark project in 2009 as a PhD student at UC Berkeley's AMPLab, a cluster-computing engine now among the most widely used for distributed data processing. His dissertation, "An Architecture for Fast and General Data Processing on Large Clusters," won the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. In 2013 he co-founded Databricks with six other Berkeley researchers to commercialise Spark. He has since worked on other data and AI software, including Delta Lake, MLflow, ColBERT, DSPy and GEPA, and held faculty posts at MIT and Stanford before joining UC Berkeley in 2023 as an associate professor of EECS in the Sky Lab. He received a Presidential Early Career Award in 2019 and the 2025 ACM Prize in Computing, announced on 8 April 2026, cited for "visionary development of distributed data systems and computing infrastructure." He is giving the $250,000 prize to charity.

Specialization

distributed systems, data infrastructure, machine learning systems, open-source software

Country

United States