Who is the CTO of Databricks?

Matei Zaharia is the Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Databricks, as of August 2026. Co-founder since 2013, chief technology officer. Matei reports to Ali Ghodsi.

MZMatei Zaharia
Matei Zaharia Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Databricks Co-founder since 2013, chief technology officer

Matei Zaharia is a co-founder and the chief technology officer of Databricks. He is a Romanian-Canadian computer scientist and educator, and he is the creator of Apache Spark, the distributed processing engine he started as a doctoral project at the AMPLab of the University of California, Berkeley and that was donated to the Apache Software Foundation in 2013. That project is the technical origin of Databricks, which he founded the same year with six other Berkeley researchers. He also started the MLflow machine learning lifecycle project, and he combines his role at the company with academic work in computer science.

Reports toAli Ghodsi
Contact••••@databricks.com (reveal in Sheets with Derrick)

Career history

  • Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Databricks Inc.2013 to present
  • Creator of Apache Spark, AMPLab, University of California, Berkeley2009 to 2013

Other leaders at Databricks

FAQ

Who is Matei Zaharia?
Matei Zaharia is the Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Databricks (as of August 2026). Co-founder since 2013, chief technology officer. You can see their background and career history above.
What is Matei Zaharia's background?
Matei Zaharia is a co-founder and the chief technology officer of Databricks. He is a Romanian-Canadian computer scientist and educator, and he is the creator of Apache Spark, the distributed processing engine he started as a doctoral project at the AMPLab of the University of California, Berkeley and that was donated to the Apache Software Foundation in 2013. That project is the technical origin of Databricks, which he founded the same year with six other Berkeley researchers. He also started the MLflow machine learning lifecycle project, and he combines his role at the company with academic work in computer science.
How can I contact Matei Zaharia at Databricks?
You can find and verify Matei Zaharia's professional email and direct phone number with Derrick, straight from Google Sheets. Databricks's addresses generally follow the first.last@databricks.com pattern, but that individual address is not verified here, so confirm it before reaching out.
Who does Matei Zaharia report to?
Matei Zaharia reports to Ali Ghodsi. See the full org chart on the Databricks executives page.

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