Matei Zaharia
CTO & Cofounder at The Apache Software Foundation
Berkeley, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMatei Zaharia is a technology leader, CTO and cofounder of Databricks with 16+ years of experience building large-scale data and AI platforms and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Berkeley. He originated Apache Spark during his PhD and has driven widely adopted open-source projects including MLflow, Delta Lake, ColBERT and the Dolly open-source LLM, combining deep systems work with applied ML and NLP research. His engineering contributions span low-level runtime and performance optimizations (e.g., KryoSerializer and append-only map improvements) to full-stack product features for ML lifecycle tooling. At Databricks he oversees product and platform strategy while continuing research into dependable LLM-enabled applications, bridging academic rigor and production-grade systems. He has a track record of shipping high-impact code—from LLVM/IR compilation work in Weld to core Spark RDD operations—and maintains active leadership roles in the Apache community. Based in Berkeley, he pairs academic credentials (PhD Berkeley) with founder instincts to translate research innovations into enterprise-scale products.
16 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Computer Science, PhD Computer Science at University of California, BerkeleyBachelor of Mathematics Honours Computer Science, Bachelor of Mathematics Honours Computer Science at University of Waterloo
Stackoverflow
11reputation
1kreached
0answers
2questions
Github Skills (38)
unit-testing10
apache-spark10
javascript10
spark10
llvm10
big-data10
data-serialization10
mlflow10
spark-streaming10
ui-design10
data-structure10
java10
serialization10
scala10
javas10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
mesos/spark
Mar 2010 - Dec 2013
Lightning-fast cluster computing in Java, Scala and Python.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1591 commits in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Matei contributed to the core functionality of the Spark framework, developing and implementing new features and improvements. Their work includes adding new operations for RDDs, such as mapPartitions, and creating unit tests for these new methods. The commits show work on serialization and deserialization within the Spark framework to support features like caching and data handling. They also made performance enhancements and incorporated documentation.
pythoncluster-computinglightningsparkscala
weld-project/weld
Jun 2016 - Sep 2017
High-performance runtime for data analytics applications
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Systems Architect
Back-end Developer & Systems ArchitectContributions:99 commits, 50 PRs, 30 pushes in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Matei primarily focused on implementing and refining the `easy-ll` library, a core component for compiling and running LLVM IR within the project. This included adding features for different types of data, checking type consistency of different expressions and building a new function. Their contributions were mainly focused on low-level code improvements and involved significant changes to the codebase. The user added the new expression type GetField and also added documentation.
data-analyticsanalyticscode-generationdatastanford
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