Matei Zaharia

Matei Zaharia (born 1984 or 1985 ) is a Romanian-Canadian computer scientist, educator and the creator of Apache Spark.

In 2026, Forbes ranked him and Ion Stoica as the richest Romanians, with a net worth of $5 billion each.

Biography Zaharia graduated from secondary school at Jarvis Collegiate Institute before moving to become an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo. Zaharia was a gold medalist at the International Collegiate Programming Contest, where his team University of Waterloo placed fourth in the world and first in North America in 2005. During his undergraduate degree at the University of Waterloo, he also greatly contributed to water rendering physics in the now open-source game 0 A.D. He also helped mod the Age of Mythology scenario called Norse Wars, which was re-adapted into the Age of Empires III scenario called Fort Wars. While at University of California, Berkeley's AMPLab in 2009, he created Apache Spark as a faster alternative to MapReduce. He received the 2014 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 is chief technology officer.

In 2023, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley as an associate professor.

Zaharia received the 2025 ACM Prize in Computing for his foundational contributions to data and machine learning systems.