PeopleofSuperintelligence

Builder

Matei Zaharia

Matei Zaharia builds data systems and AI tools for large-scale work. He graduated from the University of Waterloo with a medal for high academic standing, then completed a computer science PhD at UC Berkeley while starting Apache Spark. Spark's resilient datasets support fault-tolerant computation across large clusters. His systems work earned the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award and the 2017 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. He coauthored DSPy, and as of October 2026 he is an associate professor at UC Berkeley and co-founder and CTO of Databricks; the 2025 ACM Prize in Computing recognized his infrastructure for machine learning and AI.

Works
347
Citations
51,845
h-index
68

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.

Photo of Matei Zaharia

Timeline

  1. Before 2013

    A Waterloo education

    He graduated from the University of Waterloo with a medal for highest academic standing.

  2. 2009–2013

    Spark in graduate school

    During his UC Berkeley PhD, he started Apache Spark as an open-source project in 2009 and completed his computer science PhD in 2013. Spark uses Resilient Distributed Datasets to run fault-tolerant computations across large clusters.

  3. 2014

    An award for Spark research

    The ACM awarded him the 2014 Doctoral Dissertation Award for his Spark dissertation.

  4. By 2015

    An MIT faculty post

    In 2015, he was an assistant professor at MIT CSAIL.

  5. 2017

    An NSF research honor

    The NSF awarded him the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers for work on data processing and analytics platforms, including Spark.

  6. October 2023

    Programming language models

    He coauthored the DSPy paper, which presents a programming model for language-model pipelines and a compiler that optimizes them against a chosen metric.

  7. 2025

    A prize for AI infrastructure

    The ACM Prize in Computing recognized his distributed data systems and computing infrastructure for large-scale machine learning, analytics, and AI.

  8. As of October 2026

    At Berkeley and Databricks

    He is an associate professor of EECS at UC Berkeley and co-founder and CTO of Databricks.

Sources and credits

Photo: ICPCNews, via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY 2.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.

  1. Exclusive Interview: Matei Zaharia, creator of Apache Spark, on Spark, Hadoop, Flink, and Big Data in 2020 - KDnuggets kdnuggets.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. Matei Zaharia | EECS at UC Berkeley www2.eecs.berkeley.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. Matei Zaharia receives ACM Doctoral Dissertation award | MIT CSAIL csail.mit.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. Matei Zaharia awarded ACM Prize in Computing for contributions to data systems, enabling AI | CDSS at UC Berkeley cdss.berkeley.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. Matei Zaharia | NSF - U.S. National Science Foundation nsf.gov. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. [2310.03714] DSPy: Compiling Declarative Language Model Calls into Self-Improving Pipelines arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.