Matei Zaharia
Matei Zaharia is a Romanian-American computer scientist and the creator of Apache Spark.
Zaharia was an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo. While at University of California, Berkeley 's AMPLab in 2009, he created Apache Spark as a faster alternative to MapReduce. He received the 2015 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.
Zaharia is also a past gold medalist at the International Collegiate Programming Contest, where his team University of Waterloo placed 4th in the world and 1st in North America in 2005.
