Matei Zaharia

Matei Zaharia is a Romanian-Canadian computer scientist, educator and the creator of Apache Spark.

As of April 2022, Forbes ranked him and Ion Stoica as the 3rd-richest people in Romania with a net worth of $1.6 billion.

Biography
Zaharia graduated from secondary school at Jarvis Collegiate Institute before moving to become an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo. 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 called 0 A.D. He also helped mod the Age of Mythology scenario called Norse Wars, which was re-adapted into the Age of Empires 3 scenario called Fort Wars. While at University of California, Berkeley's AMPLab in 2009, he created Apache Spark as a faster alternative to MapReduce. He received the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his PhD research on large-scale computing.

In 2013 Zaharia was one of the co-founders of Databricks where he serves as chief technology officer.

He joined the faculty of MIT in 2015, and then became an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University in 2016.

In 2019, Zaharia received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

In 2019 he was spearheading MLflow at Databricks, while still teaching.

In 2023, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley as an associate professor.