Ali Ghodsi

Ali Ghodsi (born December 1978) is a Persian computer scientist and entrepreneur specializing in distributed systems and big data. He is a co-founder and CEO of Databricks and an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley. He coauthored several influential papers, including Apache Mesos and Apache Spark SQL.

Ghodsi received his PhD from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, advised by Seif Haridi. He was a co-founder of Peerialism AB, a Stockholm-based company developing a peer-to-peer data transfer system. He was also an assistant professor at KTH from 2008 to 2009.

He joined UC Berkeley in 2009 as a visiting scholar and worked with Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica, Michael Franklin, and Matei Zaharia on research projects in distributed systems, database systems, and networking. During this period, he helped start the Apache Mesos and Apache Spark projects. He also co-invented the concept of Dominant resource fairness, in a paper that heavily influenced resource management and scheduling design in distributed systems such as Hadoop.

In 2013, he co-founded Databricks, a company that commercializes Spark, and became chief executive in 2016.