Matei Zaharia
Romanian-Canadian computer scientist and engineer
Matei Zaharia (born 1984 or 1985) 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
From Wikipedia’s article on Matei Zaharia (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.
Born Apr 21, 1985.1
About
In 2026, Forbes ranked him and Ion Stoica as the richest Romanians, with a net worth of $5 billion each.
From Wikipedia’s article on Matei Zaharia, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2
Companies
- DatabricksFounder20
Early life and education
- 2003 to 2007University of Waterloo Bachelor of Mathematics3
- 2007 to 2012University of California, Berkeley Doctor of Philosophy; computer science3
- Date not recordedUniversity of California, Berkeley3
- Date not recordedJarvis Collegiate Institute3
Zaharia graduated from secondary school at Jarvis Collegiate Institute before moving to become an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo.
While pursuing his undergraduate degree, 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. 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. 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.
While at University of California, Berkeley's AMPLab in 2009, he created Apache Spark as a faster alternative to MapReduce.
From Wikipedia’s article on Matei Zaharia (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.
Career
Occupation: academic, university teacher, engineer, computer scientist.8 9
- Date not recordedWorked at Massachusetts Institute of Technology4
- Date not recordedWorked at Stanford University4 5
- Date not recordedFounded Databricks6
- Date not recordedFounded Apache Spark7
Known for: Apache Spark.10
In 2013, Zaharia was one of the co-founders of American data software company Databricks, where he is chief technology officer.
Academia
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 spearheaded the development of MLflow at Databricks, while still teaching.
In 2023, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley as an associate professor in the departments of electrical engineering and computer sciences. Zaharia has co-authored open source platform research on DSPy and GEPA, which focused on optimizing prompts and models to improve AI agent quality for specific tasks.[
From Wikipedia’s article on Matei Zaharia (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.
Personal life
Awards
Links
Sources
The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.
- 1WikidataMatei Zaharia on Wikidata
- 2WikipediaMatei Zaharia on Wikipedia
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- 9Wikidataoccupation, as reported
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- 12Wikidataplace of birth, as reported
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- 15Wikidataaward, as reported
- 16Wikidataaward, as reported
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- 18WikidataMatei Zaharia: X, on Wikidata
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- 20WikidataDatabricks, Founder
- 21Wikimedia CommonsMatei Zaharia photo by DKP415, CC BY-SA 4.0