Matei Zaharia
Romanian-Canadian computer scientist and engineer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Matei Zaharia (born 1984 or 1985[1]) is a Romanian-Canadian computer scientist, educator business executive. He is the creator of Apache Spark and the chief technology officer, one of the founders of Databricks and has developed open-source projects like Delta Lake, MLflow and Omnigent.[2][3][4][5]
University of Waterloo (BMath)
Databricks
Matei Zaharia | |
|---|---|
Matei Zaharia in 2026 | |
| Born | 1984 or 1985 (age 41–42) |
| Education | UC Berkeley (Ph.D.) University of Waterloo (BMath) |
| Known for | Apache Spark Databricks |
| Awards | ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award (2014) Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2019) SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award (2023) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Workplaces | UC Berkeley Stanford University Databricks |
| Thesis | An Architecture for Fast and General Data Processing on Large Clusters (2013) |
| Ion Stoica Scott Shenker | |
| Website | people |
In 2026, Forbes ranked him and Ion Stoica as the richest Romanians, with a net worth of $5 billion each.[6]
Biography
Zaharia graduated from secondary school at Jarvis Collegiate Institute before moving to become an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo.[7] Zaharia was a gold medalist at the International Collegiate Programming Contest, where his team University of Waterloo placed fourth in the world and first in North America in 2005.[8] During his undergraduate degree at the University of Waterloo, he also greatly contributed to water rendering physics in the now open-source game 0 A.D.[9] He also helped mod the Age of Mythology scenario called Norse Wars, which was re-adapted into the Age of Empires III scenario called Fort Wars.[10] While at University of California, Berkeley's AMPLab in 2009, he created Apache Spark as a faster alternative to MapReduce.[11] He received the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his PhD research on large-scale computing.[12]
In 2013 Zaharia was one of the co-founders of Databricks where he is chief technology officer.[3]
He joined the faculty of MIT in 2015, and then became an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University in 2016.
In 2019 he was spearheading MLflow at Databricks, while still teaching.[13][14][15]
In 2023, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley as an associate professor.[16]
Awards & recognition
In 2019, Zaharia received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.[7]
Zaharia received the 2025 ACM Prize in Computing for his foundational contributions to data and machine learning systems.[17]