Matei Zaharia studied at the University of Waterloo. In 2005 his team won gold at the International Collegiate Programming Contest, finishing fourth in the world and first in North America. He then went to UC Berkeley for his PhD.
In 2009, while at the Berkeley AMPLab, he created Apache Spark. It was built as a faster alternative to MapReduce for large-scale data processing. His PhD work on large-scale computing won the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.
In 2013 he co-founded Databricks, which raised a $13.9M Series A from Andreessen Horowitz that year. He is the company's chief technology officer as of October 2026. He also developed open-source projects including Delta Lake and MLflow.
He kept an academic career alongside the company. He joined MIT in 2015, became an assistant professor at Stanford in 2016, and joined UC Berkeley as an associate professor in 2023. He received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2019 and the 2025 ACM Prize in Computing.