Matei Zaharia is the CTO and Cofounder of Databricks, a company he co-founded in 2013. He also serves as an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, a position he has held since 2023. Zaharia is widely recognized as the creator of Apache Spark, a computing engine he developed during his PhD studies at the University of California, Berkeley's AMPLab in 2009 as a faster alternative to MapReduce.