Matei Zaharia

Matei Zaharia is a Romanian-Canadian computer scientist, the creator of Apache Spark and co-founder and CTO of Databricks. He started Spark during his PhD at UC Berkeley (PhD 2013, advised by Ion Stoica and Scott Shenker) and has since worked on widely used data and AI software including Delta Lake, MLflow, and ColBERT. He is an associate professor in EECS at UC Berkeley and had earlier joined MIT's faculty. Before Berkeley he earned a BMath (double major CS and Combinatorics & Optimization) from the University of Waterloo in 2007, and as a high-school student he represented Canada at the International Olympiad in Informatics in 2002 and 2003, winning silver medals both years.

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• Started Apache Spark as a UC Berkeley PhD project in 2009; it became the de facto large-scale data-processing engine and the technical foundation of Databricks.2009
• Awarded the 2025 ACM Prize in Computing, an international honor for his work on systems that scaled ML/AI globally - the newest recognition in a run that also includes PECASE (2019) and the SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award (2023).2025
• Beyond Spark, has co-created widely deployed data/AI systems: Delta Lake, MLflow, and ColBERT - a rare record of multiple industry-standard open-source projects from one person.2023
• PhD thesis 'An Architecture for Fast and General Data Processing on Large Clusters' (2013) won the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, one of the field's top thesis honors.2014
• Represented Canada at the IOI in both 2002 and 2003, taking silver both years (2003 rank 42/265, 2002 rank 44/276) - an early elite-competitor signal that predates his distributed-systems research.2003
• Holds a dual current role - associate professor at UC Berkeley EECS and CTO of Databricks - so his time is split between research and running the company built on his thesis.2026
• Waterloo BMath with a double major in Computer Science and Combinatorics & Optimization (2007); professor Srinivasan Keshav recounts that as a first-year he independently read and absorbed ~10 peer-to-peer-networking papers, and Berkeley won a bidding war with MIT for him.2007
• Forbes (2026) listed him and Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica among the richest Romanians at ~$5B each - a marker of Databricks' scale relative to his academic role.2026
• Taught COMPSCI 162 (Operating Systems and System Programming) at Berkeley in Fall 2025, showing he remains actively teaching despite the Databricks role.2025
• Attended Jarvis Collegiate Institute (Toronto) before Waterloo - confirms the Canadian path that led to representing Canada at the IOI.