# Matei Zaharia

> Matei Zaharia is a Romanian-Canadian computer scientist, UC Berkeley associate professor, and co-founder and CTO of Databricks. He began Apache Spark as a Berkeley PhD student in 2009, then helped create a succession of open-source systems - including MLflow, Delta Lake, ColBERT, DSPy and GEPA - that made large-scale data and AI work more practical. In 2026, ACM named him the recipient of its 2025 ACM Prize in Computing.

- **Role:** Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Databricks; Associate Professor of EECS at UC Berkeley
- **Organizations:** Databricks, University of California, Berkeley, Apache Software Foundation, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Waterloo
- **Nationality:** Romanian-Canadian
- **Education:** Bachelor of Mathematics, Honours Computer Science; minor in Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo, PhD in Computer Science; dissertation: An Architecture for Fast and General Data Processing on Large Clusters, University of California, Berkeley
- **Known for:** Created Apache Spark and co-started Apache Mesos and Spark Streaming., Co-founded Databricks in 2013 and has served as its CTO since its founding., Helped develop MLflow and Delta Lake and contributed to open-source AI and retrieval systems including ColBERT, DSPy and GEPA.

## Career timeline

- **2005** — Won an ICPC gold medal with the University of Waterloo team, which placed fourth worldwide and first in North America.
- **2007** — Completed a Bachelor of Mathematics at Waterloo and began doctoral study at UC Berkeley.
- **2009** — Started Apache Spark at Berkeley's AMPLab to support iterative machine learning and interactive analytics more efficiently than MapReduce.
- **2010** — Co-authored the first Spark technical report, reporting 10x performance over Hadoop on iterative machine-learning jobs.
- **2013** — Completed his PhD and co-founded Databricks with six Berkeley collaborators; became CTO.
- **2014** — Received the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award; a Spark system also set a Daytona GraySort world record.
- **2015** — Joined MIT as an assistant professor.
- **2016** — Joined Stanford University's computer science faculty.
- **2018** — Introduced MLflow, an open-source platform for managing the machine-learning lifecycle.
- **2019** — Received the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
- **2023** — Returned to UC Berkeley as an associate professor and received the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award.
- **2026** — ACM announced him as the recipient of the 2025 ACM Prize in Computing for distributed data systems and computing infrastructure.

## Achievements

- Created Apache Spark and co-started Apache Mesos and Spark Streaming.
- Co-founded Databricks in 2013 and has served as its CTO since its founding.
- Helped develop MLflow and Delta Lake and contributed to open-source AI and retrieval systems including ColBERT, DSPy and GEPA.
- Received the 2025 ACM Prize in Computing, announced in April 2026, with a $250,000 prize.
- Received the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his research on large-scale computing.
- Received the 2023 ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award, an NSF CAREER Award, and the 2019 PECASE.
- Won an ICPC gold medal in 2005; Waterloo placed fourth worldwide and first in North America.

## Latest updates

- **2026-06** — Announced Omnigent, an open-source meta-harness for composing coding and custom AI agents, and discussed agent infrastructure at the 2026 Data + AI Summit.
- **2026-06** — Was formally presented with the 2025 ACM Prize in Computing at ACM's annual awards banquet in San Francisco.
- **2026-04** — ACM named him the recipient of the 2025 ACM Prize in Computing for distributed data systems and computing infrastructure.
- **2026-04** — GEPA, co-authored by Zaharia, appeared as an oral presentation at ICLR 2026 alongside several other papers from his research collaborations.

## Links

- Website: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~matei/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mateizaharia/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/matei_zaharia
- GitHub: https://github.com/mateiz

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/matei-zaharia
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-26